Forgettable Wars, Forgetful Diasporas

Convergence 2 A&Q Operations of Forgetting The past few decades have seen an upsurge of interest in what historian Carol Gluck has termed the “operations of memory.” Critically, though, war memories are products of amnesias both selective and vast, and the profound amnesias occasioned and required by war have in turn shaped our geopolitical present. This A&Q feature understands the political and psychic work of forgetting to be more than the other to commemoration. First constituted as a roundtable—­“Unrecalled: Forgetting as a Technology of War in the Asia Pacific”—­ at the Global Asias 4 conference hosted by Penn State (March 31–­ April 1, 2017), these short essays collectively foreground forgetting as itself an operation of war by asking participants not only to rethink the dominant discourse of memory but also to explore the conceptual terrain of when, where, and for whom forgetting matters—­ especially in relation to war and conflict in the Asia-­ Pacific region. 1. How do particular modes of inscription, repositories of information , or forms of expression permit or even lend themselves to forgetting? 2. What kinds of strategies, patterns, or structures are deployed to enable forgetting for these particular modes? What are the aims and risks of these efforts? 3. What of the significant omissions that have not only been neglected by projects of recovery or redress but, in fact, disabled or made impossible by such efforts? 4. How do such technologies of forgetting permit us to reconsider wartime and postwar epistemologies of Asia as well as to appreciate the thorough and continuing technologies of forgetting that continue to shape the region and the globe? 5. Whatbroadermethodologiesortheoreticalapproachesareinvoked by technologies of forgetting war? A & Q 3 Forgettable Wars, Forgetful Diasporas Sunny Xiang On February 1, 1968, a gun and a camera went off at the same time. The result was one of the most iconic images of America’s war in Vietnam: a National Liberation Front member being shot at close range by a South Vietnamese general and an American photojournalist.1 In subsequent years, a barrage of blockbuster “docudramas” about America’s jungle adventure would similarly spectacularize the horrors of battle with dazzling splendor, “the technology of cinema . . . merging with the technology of war” (Sturken 1997, 107). As the essays for this A&Q show, national memory—­that is, officially mandated forms of selective remembering—­ tends to be especially contentious when the subject matter concerns war. My contribution to this conversation will be to discuss unintentional forgetfulness, a phenomenon that I believe must be distinguished from strategic forgetting. Such a distinction, I suggest, is especially important when discussing America’s Cold War interventions in Asia, notably its “hot wars” in Korea and Vietnam. While neither war resulted in a clear-­cut victory for a particular side, both were repackaged as triumphalist narratives of American democratic development and humanitarian rescue. What Yen Lê Espiritu calls the United States’ “We-­Win-­Even-­When-­We-­ Lose syndrome” exacts a kind of victor’s justice. By casting U.S. military intervention in Asian lands and U.S. hospitality toward Asian refugees as related causes that serve the larger aim of freedom, this “syndrome” is “amnes(t)ic” in nature: it leverages both official and unofficial forms of forgiveness in the name of organized forgetting (Yoneyama 1999, 36).2 The kind of forgetting that ultimately interests me, however, is more ordinary and less calculated. I’m thinking here of the unreflective, unprocessed , and forgetful relation to the past that describes the lives of a broad swath of migrants, refugees, exiles, and immigrants who left their homelands in the wake of war. These diasporas born of war have always already been operating at the seam of “just forgetting” and “just remembering.” I borrow these terms from Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016, 292), who conceives of just along the lines of justice and forgetting along those of forgiveness. What if we take this term just in the opposite direction ? My aim here will be to strip both forgetting and remembering of their monumental character and flatten them to the texture of the everyday. Unlike officially sanctioned acts of commemoration that offer Technicolored justice, forgetfulness attunes us to the mundane matte 4 A & Q of unremarkable just-­ ness that characterizes the ongoing experience...