In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Tortured Bodies and the Neoliberal Politics of Historical Unaccountability In 2006 the popular U.S. television show Amazing Race traveled to Vietnam. Upon arrival in Nội Bài international airport in Hanoi, contestants, who race around the globe in competition for a one-million-dollar prize, were instructed to find their way to Hỏa Lò prison, the now popular tourist attraction formerly and “infamously known as Hanoi Hilton,” the narrator informed viewers as the camera cut to an image of a French guillotine followed by dark and decrepit prison cells. “During the Vietnam war hundreds of American servicemen were held captive in Hoa Lo,” the voice continued as black-and-white footage of captured and handcuffed U.S. pilots played. “One of the most notable prisoners,” said the narrator, “was John McCain.” Next scene: The teams have found their way to the prison-turned-museum. They are instructed to locate McCain’s flight suit, on display in one of the exhibits. The prison doors open, and contestants run hurriedly through the grounds in search of the “treasure.” At no point did the narrator allude to the history of Hỏa Lò, that it had been built by the French in the late nineteenth century as part of an extensive colonial prison apparatus that housed Vietnamese communist and anticolonial revolutionaries (Zinoman 2001), a history to which most of the museum is devoted . This marginalization of U.S. memory in a space that commemorates the Vietnamese revolution quickly became apparent to viewers and contestants, who raced through a maze of rooms and hallways, unable to locate the POW exhibit. Eventually McCain’s flight suit and helmet were found hanging in a glass case in a small, inconspicuous space that presumably housed U.S. POWs during the war (see Figure 6.5). While most couples ran in, grabbed their next “clue” (assignment), C H A P T E R S I X Tortured Bodies 177 and ran out, with but a passing glance at the exhibit, two teams stopped in front of the McCain display case to bow their heads and take a moment of silence out of respect for McCain, his fellow prisoners, and U.S. servicemen “still fighting and sacrificing their lives,” one of the team members told the camera, thus linking the historical memory of the Vietnam War to current military intervention in Iraq. What was not shown in Amazing Race, however, further complicated this presumably unstaged spectacle of U.S. memory: next to McCain’s flight suit were tennis shoes, a bed with a mat, photographs of POWs attending Catholic mass and playing volleyball in the courtyard, and a book on Vietnam’s humane policy [chính sách nhân đạo], thus presenting an image of tolerable, even comfortable living conditions that sharply contradicts the sinister depictions of the “Hanoi Hilton” that inform U.S. historical imagination. This chapter addresses competing and ambiguous memories and representations of “humane” and “inhumane” acts carried out against U.S. POWs during the war in Vietnam. I am interested in the reappearance and reexamination of such images and discourses in the current Vietnamese context of global market reform, and the new meanings and force they take when positioned in relation to renewed accusations of POW torture and other human rights violations, as well as in relation to photographs of U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners. In triangulating Vietnam, Iraq, and the United States I am not suggesting the similitude and uniformity of U.S. intervention in differing historical and cultural contexts, though there are striking parallels in the underlying ideologies of American moralism and exceptionalism that have motivated and rationalized these and other U.S. imperial interventions. There are, moreover, clear parallels in the escalating tensions between memory and forgetting, redress and unaccountability, that this chapter explores. Situated in a postwar context, the analysis here demonstrates that unlike Vietnam ’s reconciliatory gesture toward the United States—a practice commonly referred to as khép lại quá khứ, hu ̛ớng về tu ̛ơng lai (close the past to face the future)— the reverse has occurred in U.S. policy toward Vietnam: that of recalling the past to shape the present and the future. In the years following the end of the war, allegations of pernicious human rights violations (also linked to POW/MIA issues) strengthened the pro-embargo agenda and stalled normalized diplomacy until 1995.Thereafter,asbilateraltradeandU.S.foreigninvestmentinVietnamincreased (and met many red-tape difficulties), accusations of wartime torture and...

Share