Obdurate History: Dinh Q. Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory

Abstract

After months of writing texts for specific books and catalogues, I have entered again a time and space of floating thoughts and feelings.I have been reading intensely, but incompletely—opening and closing book after book, then slowly returning to select a chapter, a short text, a paragraph, a phrase, a word—including Michel Foucault's “Of Other Spaces.” There he talks of the nineteenth century's “great obsession” with history, and the “ever-accumulating past,” as opposed to the present, which he describes as “an epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”But I stubbornly want to stay attentive to the ever-accumulating past in order to make (at least temporarily) some sort of sense of it.In April 2000, in the midst of headlines about the stock market's temporary collapse and the mounting tensions between Cuba and the United States over the case of the child Elian Gonzalez, I find myself studying the obdurate resurfacing of earlier history(ies) of El Salvador, Iran, and Korea. In the newspaper pages, I find these exhumed histories—histories that have literally been buried for years, or have been recorded in previously secret government documents and photographs.

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