Roots, Routes, and Rousing Song of Ghosts: Performance Research and Social Practice of Memory Work

My ongoing activism with Vietnamese refugees in California and Washington for two decades led me to explore the development of an inquiry mode that merges a critically-engaged (participatory arts) approach with an in-depth understanding of the multiple dimensions of the forced migration experience before, during, and after resettlement. This form of inquiry is based on emancipatory and anti-racism values, the ability to address travelling collective memories connected to the Vietnam war aftermaths (ghosts), and an engagement with sites of hope while allowing a critical discernment on community capacities for change.

The Vietnam/American-War-Syndromes and new colonial projects of displacement under neoliberalist democracy has halted Vietnamese’s ability to mourn losses in public. A performative project of Vietnamese collective memory therefore aims to challenge the discourses of refugee trauma, development, and post-Cold war historicism. Performative collective memory work has implications for transforming transnational ghosts into stories of resistance and liberation free from a total reliance on the text-based language of ‘standard English’. The memory work with Vietnamese refugees fosters the remembrance and visionary space in which their voices and imaginations through performative dialogues are nurtured and altered toward future action. In short, performance intervention could foster effective knowing when it goes beyond conventional aesthetic theatrical development, and reconnects to historical materialism and collective social action in placed-based and site-specific performative practice.

Overall, my dissertation would be an attempt to walk the talk of linking research and praxis in an age of cultural/economic globalization in which the refugee experience is centered on the paradox of loss and creativity. Through this dissertation, I aim to examine the possibility of an action research design that nurtures a performative space—where multiple perspectives are co-activated, and where the truth of ghosts becomes subjective and interpretive toward a healing process grounded in collective remembering and critical transformation. The dissertation would draw from selective cross-disciplinary references of social constructionism in memory studies, performance studies as intervention, social work as improvisation, and re-formation in action research as well as experiential ethnography with critical fieldwork practice. This action-oriented dissertation does seek a subsequent examination of the text-performance hybridity struggle in opening the critical space between analysis and action of Vietnamese’s difficult dialogues in an attempt to (1) bridge the dichotomy between theory and practice; and (2) outline the issues/concerns of a practice-led research focused in both methodology and intervention.