This talk proposes southern constellations as a method and political concept. To constellate is to bring together seemingly disparate spaces or objects into the same conceptual orbit, probing the new meanings and structures that emerge. To illustrate, this talk constellates three spaces often considered outside the purview of Global South studies: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South. Both South Korea and South Vietnam aligned with the US during the Cold War and therefore seemingly diverged from a Global South politics defined by socialist revolution and the Third World Liberation movement. To constellate South Korea and South Vietnam with the US South, a region in the Global North, is to then ask: how and why do some South Vietnamese and South Korean refugees and migrants to the US gravitate towards the iconography and vernacular of the US South to make legible their own “southern politics” à la Gramsci?
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). She is an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is also the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” on view at UC Irvine’s Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive Center. Her book project revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.
Date | Time
April 9, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz