Biography
Ann Tran is a Ph.D. student in the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her work explores the cultural and migration history of Vietnamese / American communities in the U.S. Gulf South, with specific attention to the struggles and experiences of fisher people who work in the Gulf of Mexico. Her research has been supported by the USC Center for Transpacific Research, the Portal to Texas History at UNT, and the Francis S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South, in addition to the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.
Research
This research project explores relational racial formations and water-based economies in the U.S. Gulf South through the lens of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora, with dedicated attention to the fisher people who work in the waters of the Gulf Coast. The Gulf of Mexico, as a site of political and racial tension, cultural exchange, and ongoing environmental disasters, possesses relational histories of transoceanic boat migrations, global racial capitalism, and ecological contaminations in the Pacific that imbricate different racial and ethnic groups as well as Native and Indigenous peoples. Given these entanglements and complications, my work engages with Native Pacific, Maritime Southeast Asia, and Black Atlantic Studies to argue for a critical understanding of immigrant & refugee placemaking that extends beyond the historiographical limits of Southern racial relations and emphasizes the materialities of water in the development of radical interracial movements and ecocritical responses to present economic and environmental crises. Charting the formation of these Southern Vietnamese / American communities from Vietnam’s fishing villages to the U.S. Gulf Coast, I investigate how war, migration, and memory contribute to the vexed legacies of race and empire in the U.S. South.
