This talk proposes southern constellations as a method and political concept. To constellate is to bring together seemingly disparate spaces or objects into the same conceptual orbit, probing the new meanings and structures that emerge in the resultant constellation. To illustrate, this talk constellates three spaces often considered outside the purview of Global South studies: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South. Both South Korea and South Vietnam aligned with the US during the Cold War and therefore seemingly diverged from a Global South politics defined by socialist revolution and the Third World Liberation movement. To constellate South Korea and South Vietnam with the US South, a region in the Global North, is to then ask: how and why do some South Vietnamese and South Korean refugees and migrants to the US gravitate towards the iconography and vernacular of the US South to make legible their own “southern politics” à la Gramsci?

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA (Tovaangar). She currently serves as an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). Dr. Gandhi is the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” which is on view at UC Irvine’s Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive Center. She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.