A Keynote Event for Displaced. Detained. Undeterred: A Critical/Creative Symposium

Thursday, April 20, 2023, Physical Sciences Building 401

4.30 Opening Remarks
Saida Hodžić (Cornell University)

4.45 KEYNOTE DIALOGUE

In this keynote, speakers Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Yến Lê Espiritu offer an intergenerational remembrance of Đại Tá [Colonel] HồNgọc Cẩn,our cậu hai [oldest maternal uncle] and ông hai[oldest granduncle] respectively, an Army of the Republic of Vietnam officer who was publicly executed by a Communist firing squad. This remembrance is a portal toa discussion on refugee grief, not as a private or depoliticized sentiment but as a resource forenacting a politics that confronts the conditions under which certain lives are considered moregrievable than others. Focusing on quotidian memory places, particularly Internet memorialsconstructed by the Vietnamese diasporic community, they will discuss how and why South Vietnam’swar dead have become so central to the refugees’ retellings of South Vietnamese losses in theUnited States. At the same time, they point out that these commemoration efforts can and dolead to harsh and unrelenting attacks against the living, especially those who harbor morecritical visions of the diasporic community.

The keynote will be followed by a reception.

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Speakers

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine, Dr. Gandhi is the co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives.

Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her books Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) and Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (co-editor) have charted an interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies, which reconceptualizes “the refugee” not as an object of rescue but as a site of social and political critiques. Dr. Espiritu is also an inaugural member of The Critical Refugee Studies Collective.

This talk discusses the geopolitics of the Single Market in financial services in the European Union (EU) by examining three crucial case studies: (1) the post-2008 crisis transatlantic tug of war, whereby the EU leveraged its Single Market vis-à-vis the US, seeking to set the rules for global finance; (2) the Brexit negotiations, when the EU acted as a block against the UK and successfully safeguarded the integrity of the Single Market; and finally, (3) in 2022, during the war in Ukraine, the EU ‘weaponized’ its Single Market through the adoption of financial sanctions against Russia. We argue that a combination of external and internal factors accounts for this geoeconomic turn: the evolution of the international economic and political system, in particular, the increasing challenges to the liberal order; and intra-EU developments, namely, the EU’s ability (regulatory capacity) and willingness (alignment of member states preferences) to deploy its Single Market geopolitically.

Speaker
Amy Verdun, Professor of Political Science at University of Victoria

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This research explores the Strauss-Eisenhower Plan, an ambitious plan designed by the United States after the Six-Day War in 1967. Now largely forgotten, the Strauss-Eisenhower Plan, named after statesman Lewis Strauss and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, followed the same logic as Eisenhower’s flagship program, Atoms for Peace, launched in the 1950s, to share peaceful nuclear technology, particularly nuclear energy, as part of US diplomacy. The plan suggested building three nuclear reactors: two on the Israel-Egypt border, and one on the Israel-Jordan border. The nuclear reactors would be used for water desalination. Through this technological innovation, which tried to solve issues of water scarcity, the Arab states and Israel were expected to build relations and ultimately make peace. The plan included proposals for the return of Palestinian refugees to work around the reactors. Nuclear technology, in this plan, is not merely national; it is meant to be shared transnationally and operated collectively. While it was never implemented, subsequent US governments continued to invoke the plan for over a decade, until the late 1970s. In the early 1970s, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ordered to study and assess the plan, and technicians even carried out trips to targeted areas in the region to collect data.

Looking at sources in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, this research examines the US’s vision, as well as how it was received in the region. What kind of future were these officials imagining? How is the Strauss-Eisenhower Plan intellectually linked to other visions of capitalist utopias envisioned by the US? Does the plan merely reinforce the Orientalist Zionist trope of ‘making the desert bloom’? This work sheds new light on how nuclear thought overlaps with, and is shaped by, affective phenomena, such as imagined futures, memories, nostalgia, as well as cultural images.

Speaker
Hebatalla Taha is an Assistant Professor of Israel Studies at SUNY Binghamton and an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po Paris. She is a scholar of Politics and International Relations, whose work lies at the intersection of political economy and security in the modern Middle East, particularly Israel and Palestine. Her doctoral work analyzes the role of Palestinians of 1948 in Israeli capitalism. More recently, she is also researching nuclear histories and technologies in the Middle East.

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