Displaced Subjects: Revolution, Film, and Women in Việt Nam and Palestine

Abstract

168 Lan Duong and Lila Sharif Displaced Subjects: Revolution, Film, and Women in Việt Nam and Palestine Here was a people with an indomitable spirit, a people whose heroic deeds placed them among the gods; here was a people whose unbound humanity was a blessing to mankind. The Palestinians must learn the secrets of the Vietnamese. —­ Leila Khaled, 1971 There is a force that puts us together on the same road, and this is what strengthens our determination: The struggle of Việt Nam is the struggle of Palestine and the struggle of Palestine is the struggle of Việt Nam. —­ spokesperson, Women’s Union for the Liberation of Việt Nam, 1974 The two quotes by women resistance leaders inaugurating this essay bespeak the revolutionary history linking Palestine and Việt Nam in their struggles for liberation during the globalized revolts against colonial occupation , militarized violence, and empire in the 1960s and 1970s, and beyond.1 Marking this convergence, our essay juxtaposes Palestinian and Vietnamese filmic production during the so-­ called revolutionary and contemporary periods to argue that the subject of revolution has been displaced in recent Vietnamese and Palestinian films. Through a transnational , relational, and feminist mode of analysis, we explore how the female resistance fighter emerges in Palestinian and Vietnamese revolutionary cinemas as a salient signifier of a militant call to arms for a nation in fragments. We then analyze how the images of this figure have been resummonsed in the “post-­9/11” era, this time to perform an assimilative role rooted in neoliberal2 tropes of selfhood and individual complexity that extract her from a notion of the collective. Rather than commend Displaced Subjects 169 these representations as evidence of a globalized cosmopolitanism, we chart the rupture of revolution within the films and their contexts. Where before she was a “woman warrior,” the Vietnamese and Palestinian woman is conscripted to perform a new role on-­ screen in contemporary film: to quell the anxieties of failed revolution and facilitate imperial objectives of assimilation and pacification. Given such concessions, we query the ways in which revolution and revolutionary feminism have been displaced in contemporary discursive constructions of Việt Nam and Palestine and underscore how decolonial insurgencies give way to individualistic concerns about selfhood in a post-­ 9/11 context. While film is the medium through which we trace this dissolution, it is the framework of Yến Lê Espiritu’s (2014) “critical juxtaposition” that we operationalize to probe Vietnamese and Palestinian representations on the screen. According to Espiritu, critical juxtaposing refers to an epistemological and methodological enjoining of “seemingly different and disconnected events, communities, histories and spaces in order to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible about the contours, contents and afterlives of war and empire” (21). In this vein, our essay demonstrates that the critical juxtaposition of subaltern cinemas enables a vigorous critique of U.S. and Israeli cultural hegemony for Palestine and Việt Nam, even as these communities have been differently memorialized in dominant global historiographies. Critical juxtaposition also enables an epistemological resuscitation of a shared history of revolt, one that is often cited only peripherally or additively. Expanding Espiritu’s definition, we deliberately enjoin Palestine and Việt Nam to make visible the disjointed, uneven ways that their revolutionary histories have been appropriated to fulfill the goals of post-­9/11 imperial projects. Conjoining the theoretical insights of critical refugee studies with feminist theory, cinema studies, and critical ethnic studies, we focus on “film feminisms”3 in the so-­called Global South to illustrate the need for a collaborative, feminist mode of knowledge production, one that highlights intersecting and relational colonial histories and the forms of resistance that have historically been activated in Việt Nam and Palestine. Serving as “weapons of culture,”4 revolutionary cinemas of the 1960s and 1970s advanced an indigenous, critical, and noncapitalist mode of visualizing and narrativizing anticolonial struggles from the perspective of the oppressed, powered by a cinematic language founded in the Soviet Union in the 1920s5 and shaped by the Third Cinema movement in the 1960s more generally.6 These latter cinemas were also produced during the height of the Cold War, a bipolar...