Disaster Governance and Acoustic Atmospheres in Urban Vietnam

 
Disasters disrupt, altering the course of urban futurity and how people perceive, navigate and make sense of risk and uncertainty. This talk argues for greater attention to the sensory dimensions of disasters—from warfare to pandemics—particularly as experienced through sonic rupture. Such catastrophic events not only generate profound social, economic, temporal, and material disruptions to everyday life. They also effect a radical sensory reorientation—one that compels new ways of being in, caring for, and attuning to urban environments through sound. In an era dominated by vision, what can the sounds associated with declared emergencies—from wartime sirens to pandemic broadcasts—reveal about disaster governance and experiences of vulnerability? How might listening to acoustic atmospheres—shaped by histories of war and revolution—offer new insights into states of exception and their implications for collective life? Drawing on embodied “soundwork” conducted in urban Hanoi during the pandemic, this talk explores sound-based interventions within a framework of “disaster socialism” and their reactivation of sonic memories—from aerial bombardment to struggles for national liberation. While sound-reproduction technologies projected socialist state authority through sonic domination—commanding public attention to safeguard against perceived external threats—instances of cooperation and cohesion coexisted alongside sonic dissent.

Biography: Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside specializing in cold war cultural studies, critical urban theory, and new materialisms. For over two decades, her research has examined the lasting material and cultural legacies of American imperialism and infrastructural warfare in Vietnam, and the Cold War circulation of people, technologies, and design practices among allied socialist countries that unfolded in response. She is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana UP, 2009) and the award-winning Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020), which together address the material and cultural practices central to how people remember and rebuild after human-made catastrophes. Her forthcoming autoethnography, Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (UC Press), extends her work on the multisensory dimensions of urban decay and ruination to encompass the anthropology of sound.
 
This talk is part of the 50 Years Later: The American War in Vietnam series. Before or after the talk, you are encouraged to view Art in the Wake of the Cold War in the Ackland Upstairs area: Works by Dinh Q. Lê, Nguyễn Gia Trí, and Hồng-Ân Trương present the enduring nature of the war, as well as the international conflicts and personal journeys that resulted from it. Nguyễn’s work displays the disruption of the landscape during wartime; Lê’s work shows the devastation of Cambodia in the years following 1975; and Trương’s work speaks to generational effects of the war. These pieces are curated as a teaching collection for GEOG 266: People and Environment in Southeast Asia.