Overview
I am a doctoral student in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, where my research focuses on Vietnamese and Vietnamese American cultural productions through hip-hop from the afterlife of war, refugehood, and capitalist economic reforms. I theorize on the creative and critical possibilities from refugee lives and generations thereafter. I engage in the fields of Black Sound Studies, Asian American studies, Vietnamese Studies, Global Hip-Hop Studies, and Performance and Media Studies to study the translocal musical and cultural productions between Little Saigons in the U.S. and Saigon in Vietnam. My areas of focus: Vietnamese music and sounds, Southeast Asian and Asian American hip-hop, and Black Excess Aesthetics.
My dissertation project “Hip-Hop in and of Vietnam: Performances, Sonic and Visual Aesthetics” is my writing on hip-hop and Vietnameseness. This dissertation makes an important contribution to Critical Refugee Studies by recentering Vietnamese music and sound. My project asks: how does an engagement with hip-hop construct the Vietnamese refugee subject? How do Vietnamese performers construct Vietnamese cultural identity post-1986 Đổi Mới “Renovation Era” through hip-hop? How do translocal friendships allow for post-war generations to navigate, negotiate, and unify between the nation and diaspora after the war? By attending to grillz jeweler Johnny Dang, rappers Thai VG and Suboi, and DJs from the Cipherz turntablist crew, I seek answers.
My live sonic performances “Lo(về) (Quê)er” commemorate the end of the Vietnam war. My DJ sets play in the tension of reunification of Vietnam post-1975 by mixing musics—nhạc vàng, Southern Vietnamese music yearnings and sorrow over loss of homeland and nhạc đỏ, Northern Vietnamese music played in revolution in the unification of the nation. Unimaginable to earlier waves of exilic refugees, subsequent generations of refugees dream up life after war through hybridizing, negotiating, and feminizing / queering / transing. My mixes uplifts these sonic productions of Vietnamese diasporic singers like Lynda Trang Đài, Phạm Duy, Sailorr, and Thuỷ as well as poems and interviews from QTViệt Café Collective of artists.
I graduated in DJ turntablism from the Beat Junkies Institute of Sound in Glendale, California and earned my BA in Critical Ethnic Studies and English Literature from Kalamazoo College.
For more: djxmiu.com.
In the news
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- PMAPS Colloquium: Don’t Call it a Comeback, Call it a Renaissance: Hip-Hop and Country Music with Paige Chung and Lauryn Jones