Anthropology Professor Receives NEH Fellowship
Professor Christina Schwenkel of the anthropology department recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to facilitate further work on her new book, “Revitalizing the City: Socialist Architecture, Postwar Memory, and Urban Renewal in Vietnam.” Professor Schwenkel’s research concentrates on the city of Vinh in north central Vietnam, which was virtually destroyed during the “American War,” and where she lived in an East German-built socialist tenement (Quang Trung) between September 2010 and May 2011. During her time in the housing blocks, she became completely immersed in its culture– eating, drinking, and living among the people, making friends, and compiling the story of their community.
Currently, over half the residents living in the Quang Trung tenements are people who originally moved in during the 1970s, when the structures were new. Contrary to what preliminary research led her to believe, Professor Schwenkel found that the community originally disliked the five-story buildings and saw them as something foreign and incongruous with their space and culture. Over the past thirty years, however, the close quarters of Quang Trung have fostered a public space of community and support that residents now struggle to protect against privatization and impending demolition. Although the housing structures were once denounced as cramped and architecturally Eurocentric, the community of Vinh has come to see them as a kind of local heritage– a place where people were able to put their lives back together and construct a future for themselves in the aftermath of the war. While the first part of her book explores the construction of Quang Trung and its role in presenting the city as a modern socialist internationalist urban space, the second half details the ongoing struggle to adjust to capitalist redevelopment, which threatens to erase Quang Trung’s history and uproot its community.
Why are some old buildings in an impoverished city all the way across the world so important? As Professor Schwenkel points out, since the end of the Vietnam War, Americans haven’t paid much attention to the enduring consequences of the war, nor its impact on human lives in Vietnam. Vinh City provides an important example of what those consequences have been. These old buildings are more than just cement structures; they are symbols of suffering and what it took for a community to overcome that suffering. “U.S. public culture has a habit of quickly forgetting about the victims of our wars and the people who continue to live with the traumatic aftermaths of military violence,” Schwenkel says. Perhaps in recognizing the repercussions of old actions, we may provide ourselves with a greater wisdom in future ones.
Professor Schwenkel’s research, including her fieldwork in Vietnam and archival research in Germany were also supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, and The UC Pacific Rim Research Program, all prestigious organizations dedicated to supporting international humanities research.
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