Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021. viii, 230 pp. (Table, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 9781478011774.
The first sentence of the Acknowledgements: “My father used to tell us ghost stories,” hints at Experiments in Skin’s serious treatment of ghostly epistemologies (vii). The book interweaves skin stories, war stories, and ghost stories, while foregrounding acts of making do as tactics of survival among traumatic legacies, chemical afterlives, seen and unseen scars, and contaminated inheritances. Skin in this book takes on material and immaterial forms and is marked by visible and invisible wounds. Skin is also an archival site and repository of toxicity and memories. As author Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu says, “Skin remembers” (48). In pursuing the ghostly traces of latent histories, Tu’s book theorizes the connections between surfaces of racialized, gendered, commercialized, militarized, and medicalized skin on multiple scales across the US and Vietnam, while being attentive to alternate logics of relationality and responsibility.
In the Introduction, Tu argues that skin was reconceived during the age of European colonialism as a “terrestrial landscape” that could be mapped and racialized (6). Tu shows archival photographs of feet from the work of US military medical units operating across East and Southeast Asia. From this archive of feet and its implications of race, gender, and coloniality, Tu turns to the contemporary scene of the Calyx Spa in Ho Chi Minh City. In chapter 1, the work of Hoa, the head aesthetician at the spa, embodies a feminist ethics of care and carrying on within the opacity of skin conditions that can be traceable to the toxic residues of the Vietnam War. Situating the Calyx Spa as part of the landscape of consumption since Vietnam’s economic reforms, Tu conveys the complex social and epistemological frames at work in a beauty spa.
Chapter 2 brings us to the Holmesburgh Prison near Philadelphia where Dr. Albert Kligman conducted racist dermatological experiments on incarcerated Black subjects in 1951. Kligman’s work led to the discovery of Retin-A and contributed to the development of Agent Orange’s toxicity that still has an ecological impact today. In chapter 3, Tu shows the dermatologist Marion Sulzberger’s work on the Military Dermatology Research Program during the Vietnam War as an example of failed “race-making technologies across the Pacific” (79). Chapter 4 introduces Lieutenant William Akers who took over the Military Dermatology Research Program and connects this work to the US Army Medical Command’s “Field Dermatology Research Team” led by Captain Alfred M. Allen. In this chapter, Tu reads a striking image from the book, Skin Diseases in Vietnam that shows a smiling Vietnamese boy holding a rat. Here, the optics of interspecies familiarity becomes a way of framing the boy as a threat. In these three chapters, Tu shows the racist, masculinist efforts to map epidermal differences as racial differences that then functioned as a justification for state-sanctioned military violence.
In the powerful concluding chapter, Tu returns the stage to the women of the Calyx Spa, showing that the pursuit of beauty is anything but superficial. Tu shows how the women associated with the spa (a site which is understudied in macro-narratives of the Vietnam War) are neither heroes nor passive victims of capital but agentive social actors who, through beauty, are making their lives “more livable” (160). The racist labour of Kligman, Sulzberger, Akers, and Allen to produce skin as a medical and military problem is thus juxtaposed with the quotidian labour and logics of care and remediation at the Calyx Spa.
Experiments in Skin has a strong ethical and feminist impulse. In the juxtaposition of wartime or military-related experiments in skin with the different logic of experiment practiced by the women at the spa, Tu acknowledges Yến Lê Espiritu’s method of “critical juxtaposition” as “an attempt to bring together the seemingly disconnected to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible about the afterlives of war and empire” (21). With the spa at the heart of this book, Tu foregrounds the non-binaristic, pluralistic knowledge of working-class women’s labour. Even while recognizing and examining the wounds of war, coloniality, and their painful legacies, Tu avoids deterministic mourning. Her observation that “damaged ecologies are not barren wastelands—sites to leave behind and mourn—but landscapes of altered imaginations where people continue to build lives” is an important reminder of the shared vulnerable entanglement between the skin of a person and the skin of the earth as well as the ethics of recognizing the everyday acts of caring and carrying on (20).
Tu’s mode of counter-reading reclaims vulnerability. Reclaiming vulnerability is an ethical response to racist determinations of those (Asians, Black people, the incarcerated) who were made to seem invulnerable so that the violence inflicted upon them can be rationalized. Reclaiming vulnerability is also an act of rejecting the invisibilization of legacies of pain and damage on bodies of humans and the environment. In Tu’s tracing of the racist experiments that led to the creation of common cosmeceuticals and also the global implication of toxified environments, I recall Michael Rothberg’s work on the implicated subject and non-direct modes of complicity (Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrator, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019). Tu’s focus on women “making do” and living on in the toxified present, without forgetting difficult histories, shares affinities with some works of contemporary Vietnamese cinema, particularly the documentary film The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil (2018), directed by Pham Thu Hang.
Recent years have seen outstanding multidisciplinary, inventive, and rigorous work concerning the pasts, presents, and futures of Vietnam and Vietnamese people from transnational or diasporic perspectives. Of note are Thy Phu’s Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2022) and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022). The inclusion of these books along with Experiments in Skin in course syllabi will contribute significantly to decolonial and anti-imperialist discourse and the critical revisioning of the legacies of the Vietnam (or American) War.
Elizabeth Wijaya
University of Toronto, Mississauga