Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Emily Hue, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Southeast Asian, Text, Ritual, and Performance (SEATRiP) at the University of California, Riverside.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact [email protected].

Abstract

Hue will be delivering a talk, inspired by her first book Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2025) that uses visual and performance analysis to explore how Southeast Asian diasporic artists use, in some cases, self-injury, to express their vulnerability to challenges of military rule as well as resettlement. What kinds of limitations and gains do artists encounter within arts and humanitarian industries as a result of performances of self-injury or, for some artists, abstraction of the body altogether?

About the Speaker

Emily is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and core faculty in Southeast Asian Text, Ritual, Performance (SEATRiP). Her research and teaching are in the fields of Asian American Studies, feminist studies, and performance, and more recently, in new materialisms and sustainable design. You can find her most recent writing in the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, American Studies Quarterly, Amerasia, and the Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives. She hails from Brooklyn, NY.