Chó bò is the approximate Vietnamese homonym for ~ trouble. Bluntly translated, chó bò is a ~ dog cow or ~ dog crawl. This linguistic joke for many Vietnamese people learning English represents a capacity to make trouble.

This PhD thesis comprises original research and artistic work made with my family. As people from the Vietnamese diaspora, our experiences are formed by dispersals and estrangements as settler-colonisers on this continent. Our daily encounters in the realms on which this thesis is focused—contemporary art, academia, and family enterprise—are folded into distinct systems of colonial power and violence.

I often make work with my family in video-performance and the documentary form. Our inter-generational, political, and language differences add to the conceptual complexity of what it means to collaborate, make art, produce archives, and confront our position as displaced people. This thesis aims to address how our artistic collaborations utilise linguistic and archival approaches to articulate the systemic racism we encounter as people from a refugee background, but who are also embroiled in the colonial infrastructures of our new home.

Aligning with thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and her critique of coloniality, to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Hito Steyerl on minoritarian forms of translation, and to Sara Ahmed on racism in the university, this thesis describes how collaborations with my family can trouble the contradictions of colonial violence within our relationships.

Reconnecting with individual members of my family through art, I have gained a better understanding of my language and culture; I have also found important artistic and political connection with peers. Collaborating with my family has forced me to rub against the researcher-research subject binary, the archival visibility of being invisible, the rhetoric of institutional inclusion, and the weight of being displaced and displacing colonial subjects. The work we have produced together methodologically uncovers and critiques the opaque confrontations of institutional power, racism, and colonial violence in the everyday. As a family, we continue to make uncomfortable pronunciations like chó bò, producing the epistemic trouble necessary to face the colonial realities of our resettlement. 

FOR MORE INFORMATION: james@jamesnguyen.com.au