.png){kind=small}
HKU Tourism Seminars Series
War Travels: The Logistics of Vietnam War Militourism
Date: 23 JAN 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 15:00-17:00 (HKT)
Venue: CLL, Department of Geography, 10/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=98026
Abstract:
This presentation explores the everyday entanglements of militarism and tourism that helped sustain soldiering life during the Vietnam War. Free world soldiers in Vietnam were entitled to take between five and seven days of leave in rest and recuperation (R&R) sites located within the war zone and across the Pacific more generally. This presentation places the literature on militourism in conversation with close readings of archival sources to show how imperial soldier-tourists used trans-Pacific infrastructures of military R&R in a diversity of ways. Militourists in colonized cities such as Manila and Hong Kong often enacted heteronormative fantasies of leisure, seeking out intimate and predatory relationships with local women. The U.S. military also valued R&R as a mechanism for reuniting soldiers with their families, however, and transformed Honolulu into a site for hosting such forms of leave. When considered together, these different forms of militourism emphasize how trans-Pacific R&R infrastructures served simultaneously as conduits of gendered violence, terrains of racial management, and objects of political struggle. What this article offers, then, is a more complex understanding of militourism, one that reclaims vernacular cultures of travel from militaries, markets, and empires, and repurposes them to further the urgent work of abolition, decolonization, and demilitarization.
Prof. Wesley L. Attewell
Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts
The University of Hong Kong
Wesley Attewell is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Geography at the University of Hong Kong. He works at the intersection of human geography, American studies, and Asian diaspora studies to map the transnational geographies of U.S. empire building from the Cold War into the present. His first book, The Quiet Violence of Empire: How USAID Waged Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was published in Spring 2023 by the University of Minnesota Press. It has been reviewed as a rich account of how the U.S. transformed post-1945 Afghanistan into a key site for reimagining development into a liberal form of counterinsurgency. He is currently working on a second book, titled The Lifelines of Empire: Logistical Life in the Decolonizing Pacific, which attends to the transpacific logistics infrastructures and the racialized labour regimes that the US assembled to supply its race war in Vietnam.
Comments