Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam by Thy Phu (review)
Kodai Abe
Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 26, Number 2, June 2023,
pp. 287-289 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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Reviews

identities that reclaim Korean heritage and Zainichi communities” through acts ofheroism (77). This chapter persuasively engages rhetoric around systemic, racist
disadvantages against working-class whites as well as model minority discourses
about Japanese assimilation into dominant cultures. University courses whichteach either film would benefit from assigning these chapters for discussion.
Indeed, Whitewashing the Movies has powerful and memorable arguments inthe final chapters, such as when Oh states that “White-dominated media culture
has asserted that not only do White lives matter but that White lives are all thatmatter” (110). Chapter 6’s focus on Yellow Peril filmmaking and the white savior
trope in Dragonball Evolution (2009) and Ghost in the Shell (2017), combinedwith Oh’s breaking down of the unidirectionality of cross-racial casting and thepower of fan backlash and box-office flops in the conclusion, is engaging andimportant. Oh’s work is fearless and mostly hopeful, but sometimes feels tragic
as he concedes that structural racism and postracial color blindness are powerfultrends in Hollywood that make this dream of race-conscious casting and thedeconstruction of racial essentialism hard to see as viable futures. However, that
doesn’t stop Oh as he offers strategies for better understanding whitewashing so that we have a “better chance of dismantling it” (159). Ultimately, Oh’simaginative scholarship is provocative, optimistic, and generous in its willingness
to rethink theory and practice for a new era of Hollywood.
Shawn M. Higgins
Temple University Japan Campus

Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam, by Thy Phu. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2022. viii + 237 pp. $102.95 cloth. ISBN 978-1-47801036-4; $26.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1075-3.
In 2014, the International Festival of Photojournalism (Visa pour l’image) held in
Perpignan, France, displayed an exhibition of wartime pictures taken by North
Vietnamese photographers. Among other eye-catching images, the cocurator
Patrick Chauvel featured Đoàn Công Tính’s 1966 piece capturing Vietnamesesoldiers’ black silhouettes climbing a steep cliff with a rope on the Ho Chi MinhTrail. A scandal erupted the next year, when the Danish photojournalist Jørn
Stjerneklar revealed that the picture had been “photoshopped” with a picturesque waterfall as the background. The photographer as well as the organizers
were accused of compromising journalistic ethics, and Tính’s name and work weredeleted from the festival’s official website. But “what might such manipulation

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mean for the historical record and for the politics of memory?” (79), Thy Phu’s
Warring Visions provocatively asks. American audiences learn about the Vietnam
War through certain images like the naked girl (Kim Phuc) running from a napalm
explosion and the Viet Cong officer (Bay Lop) being shot in the head, but suchiconic photos of spectacular violence tell the story of the “Vietnam War,” notthe “American War” that the Vietnamese lived through. Audiences today would
no longer see the camera as a transparent representational apparatus, but Phu
urges her readers to go one step further in looking at war photography. “For abroader perspective on war,” she writes, “we need to expand ‘war photography’
beyond the narrow parameters defined by the Western press” (11). By zooming inon photographic practices of retouching, staging, imperfection, and ordinariness,
Thy Phu’s Warring Visions offers a visual counterarchive of the war in Vietnam.
The book’s titular concept, warring visions, denotes Phu’s endeavor to shedlight on the political and performative angle of the deployment of photography.
With this concept, she explores “how Vietnamese communities actively enlisted
images to project aesthetic and ideological positions, the stakes of which werenothing less than legitimizing competing claims to the nation” (15). Phu’s perspective goes beyond the spatially and temporally restricted concept of the“Vietnam War.” The war in Vietnam constitutes “a watershed in visual history,”
she argues, “because it shaped the ways that spectators, located mainly in theglobal North, look at and think about images” (8). Building on the works of Sylvia
Chong, Nina Hien, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Christina Schwenkel, among others,
the critical lens of Warring Visions challenges our apertures that continue to be
reduced by Cold War optics.
The book contains two parts that respectively focus on communist North
Vietnam and diasporic Vietnam primarily from the South. Chapter 1 questions
the relationship between photography and revolution by scrutinizing The Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s representational practices. Drawing on Chineseart historian Xiaobing Tang’s work, Phu shows how “socialist ways of seeing”
emerged in local Vietnam within an international network of visual exchange.
For revolutionary artists, imperfection due to short supply was sublimated intoa part of their style. Phu traces the rise and fall of the revolutionary power ofNorth Vietnamese visual politics, from overtly fictional utopian images printed
in the magazine Vietnam Pictorial to the post–Đổi Mới late socialists’ inclination
to prefer more tamed images. Chapter 2 documents how Vietnamese, bothsocialist and republican, strove to control the symbolic meaning of the figureof revolutionary women, and links these wartime representational strategies inVietnam to a critique of US feminism. Though North American women’s antiwar
activists showed a willingness to form solidarity with North Vietnamese, thelatter’s strategy to aggressively represent and disseminate the image of a “girlwith a gun” did not conform to the former’s mild taste and gender code. “TheReviews

fact that Vietnamese women went to war unsettled liberal beliefs about women’sostensibly ‘natural’ pacifism” (105), Phu observes. The transpacific circulation of
militarized Vietnamese women foregrounds the spectrum from liberal to radicalfeminism, which invites questions about the relationality between women andwarfare and the cultural politics thereof.
Part two focuses on the South Vietnamese who, after the war, were compelled to destroy or abandon their wartime photographs because they “foughtfor the wrong side.” For the diasporic Vietnamese who had to flee their homecountry, memory, reenactment, and archiving became crucial political issues.
Chapter 3 briefly revisits the issue of staging in Nguyễn Ngo·c Ha·nh’s photobook Vietnam in Flames (1968) and analyzes An-My Lê’s acclaimed Small Wars
(1999–2002), a photo series that captures Vietnam War reenactors in Virginia.
By situating her own female Vietnamese body as an enemy within compositions, Lê creates a disturbing tension between sympathetic collaboration withand critical betrayal of white male American reenactors. Her work provides “acultural form for the transmission of postmemory,” Phu argues, “in a processthat unfolds privately and publicly, with personal and interpersonal resonances”(145). Chapter 4 analyzes orphaned, “unhomed” family photos—ones sold in
vintage shops in Vietnam, refugee ID photos, military academy photo albums,
and so on—of the Vietnamese diaspora, including Phu’s own. Against the NorthSouth bifurcation of country and its families, diasporic Vietnamese assemble
dispersed photographs and thereby redefine, broaden, and sometimes queer
the definition of family. As Dinh Q. Lê’s works and Phu’s own co-project Family Camera Network demonstrate, the act of collecting itself is a cultural andpolitical action for diasporic Vietnamese.
Though Phu repeatedly emphasizes how personal and limited her perspective is, the scope of Warring Visions reaches far beyond Vietnam. The American
War has not ended for the Vietnamese, nor for other fractured nations that wereforced to serve as a proxy battlefield of the global Cold War. But the frameworkof “warring visions” empowers us not only to historicize enduring hostility but
also to imagine and discuss the end of it by scrutinizing photography. In theepilogue, Phu features a picture of Vietnamese women embracing at the newsof the end of the war in 1975. “Warring visions persist even when the war hasended,” she writes, “and do so alongside attempts at reconciliation” (188). Whenit comes to critiquing the long Cold War, evoking images of peace can becomea radical gesture. Through expanding our visual horizons, Phu’s book critically
updates the ways we look at photography, war, and history.
Kodai Abe
Binghamton University (SUNY)

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