Lan Duong
· Associate ProfessorUniversity of Southern California · Cinema and Media Studies Division
Active 2000–2025
About
Lan Duong, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research areas include feminist film theory, postcolonial literature, Asian American cinema, and genre studies. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, and her second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present day through the lens of the archival site. Dr. Duong’s critical works have been published in various academic journals and anthologies, and she has coedited Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art. She is a Founding Member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, serving as the website editor and co-editor for the series Critical Refugee Studies at the University of California Press. Additionally, she is a poet with her debut collection, Nothing Follows, published by Texas Tech University Press.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
- History
- Media studies
- Law
- Linguistics
- Art
- Visual arts
- Archaeology
Selected publications
2025-08-20
book-chapterRefugee memories in Vietnamese diasporic films
2024-02-28
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter looks at refugee memories as they have been archived in the Vietnamese diasporic cinematic imagination. Trần Anh Hùng's La Pierre de l’Attente (1991) (The waiting stone) and Khoa Đỗ's Mother Fish (2009) embody some aspects of ‘Fifth Cinema,’ which is constituted by the political impulse of the films and the innovative means by which refugees collaboratively produce their work (Kaur and Grassilli). The chapter argues that Trần's and Đỗ's fictional works importantly engender refugee (and not diasporic) lives and protest, in centring the figure of the refugee in both the films’ stories and their modes of production.
Song, Sound, and Refugee affect In Life of a Flower and Song Lang
2023-02-06
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter upends global media's archive of Vietnamese refugees, one that has captured images of refugees fleeing in fear and cowering en masse. I look to a different archive altogether—Vietnamese fictional films that narrate the refugee movement within a highly melodramatic register. Life of a Flower (1953) and Song Lang (2018) offer a baroque window onto which the landscape of migration is studded with deeply felt sentiments of exile and loss. Both films reverberate with refugee affect, born of a historically situated sense of displacement and grounded in one of the most popular theatrical genres in Việt Nam–the cải lương opera.
2022-09-20
book-chapterOpen accessSenior author2. A Refugee Critique of Fear: On Livability and Durability
2022-09-20
book-chapterSenior authorUniversity of California Press eBooks · 2022 · 7 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
Departures supports, contextualizes, and advances the field of critical refugee studies by providing a capacious account of its genealogy, methods, and key concepts as well as its premises, priorities, and possibilities. The book outlines the field's main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples of how to link communities, movements, networks, artists, and academic institutions and forge new and humane reciprocal paradigms, dialogues, visuals, and technologies that replace and reverse the dehumanization of refugees that occurs within imperialist gazes and frames, sensational stories, savior narratives, big data, colorful mapping, and spectator scholarship. This resource and guide is for all readers invested in addressing the concerns, perspectives, knowledge production, and global imaginings of refugees.
4. A Refugee Critique of Representations: On Criticality and Creativity
2022-09-20
book-chapterSenior author2022 · 28 citations
- Computer Science
- Computer Science
2022-09-20
paratextOpen accessSenior author3. A Refugee Critique of Humanitarianism: On Ungratefulness and Refusal
2022-09-20
book-chapterSenior author
Frequent coauthors
- 8 shared
Yến Lê Espiritu
- 1 shared
Nikolas Giakoumidis
- 1 shared
Khatharya Um
University of California, Berkeley
- 1 shared
Lila Sharif
- 1 shared
Victor Bascara
University of Guam
- 1 shared
Lawrence-Minh B�i Davis
- 1 shared
Catzie Vilayphonh
- 1 shared
Yền Lê Espiritu
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