Library History as Data-Art-Life: Fabulating the Vietnamese Past
10 am, Fri 08 Aug 2025
EMASI Nam Long
147 No. 8 Street, Nam Long Residential Area, HCMC
Language: English (with live translation)
Registration link
From the organizer:
Nguyễn Art Foundation is pleased to present a two-part event (8 & 9 August) that brings together scholars and practitioners exploring the complex entanglements between reading, gender, institutional power, and historical memory in Vietnam and its diasporas. Moving across colonial archives, library histories, and literature, the program rethinks the act of reading – not as passive consumption, but as a site of resistance, imagination, and world-making.
Through diverse lenses – feminist critique, critical fabulation, and institutional analysis – these speakers interrogate who gets to read, what is considered public or private, and how gendered dynamics shape literary and cultural encounters. The program highlights how readers, particularly women, have long negotiated visibility, agency, and power through their engagement with texts.
Day 1 – 08 Aug: Library History as Data-Art-Life: Fabulating the Vietnamese Past with Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyen
This talk is an invitation into the experimental transdisciplinary approach of Dr Nguyen’s book ‘Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam’. Beyond an academic book of Vietnamese history, it is a work of critical fabulation through visual archives, data aesthetics, and experienced architectures. Interweaving method and theory, the author centers historical agency of Vietnamese library readers in colonial institutions, to ultimately trouble questions of power and publicity. This talk moves from static and disciplinary framings of History towards a dynamic crisscrossing of data-art-life that centers absence, imagination, and relationality.
Day 2 – 09 Aug: August: Women’s Reading: Theory and Practice with Dr. Cindy Anh Nguyen and Dr. Yen Vu. Moderated by Dr. Nguyen Thi Minh.
Biography:
Cindy Anh Nguyễn is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles with appointments in Information Studies, Digital Humanities Program, and Asian Languages & Culture. Her forthcoming book ‘Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam’ (University of California Press, 2026) uncovers how libraries functioned as both instruments of colonial dominance and an experimental space of public critique. Nguyen’s transdisciplinary research examines the historical and socio-technical production of knowledge in Southeast Asia through libraries, encyclopedia, visual media, and language through feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches. She bridges academia and the public through her multimedia arts practice and community platforms. Her work has appeared in Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, the Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum, Wasafiri, Ajar Press, Diacritics, and exhibitions such as ‘Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Vietnamese Diaspora’.
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