C Schwenkel
Biographic Data
| ID | 53428 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Schwenkel |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Schwenkel |
| SIGNATURE | SCHWENKEL C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0186-6255 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 299 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Afterword: Concluding thoughts on the politics of memory in Asia
Anthropological research on memory and memorial practices has proliferated in the discipline in recent years. This unprecedented 'memory boom' has not been without its critics, however. David Berliner (2005), for example, has argued that the study of memory in its multiple discursive forms and settings (social, national, material, cultural...) has resulted in categorical and terminological confusion. On the other hand, as the papers in this colle…
Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World
In keeping with the tenets of socialist internationalism, the political culture of the German Democratic Republic strongly emphasized solidarity with the non-white world: children sent telegrams to Angela Davis in prison, workers made contributions from their wages to relief efforts in Vietnam and Angola, and the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired public memorials. Despite their prominence, however, schol…
Social housing and feminist commoning in urban Vietnam
This article examines challenges to the privatization of public goods in social housing in urban Vietnam, where versatile modes of commoning have been essential to sustaining life and livelihoods. Informed by theories of feminist commoning, it highlights the collective efforts of elderly women, in particular, to appropriate state property and maintain the commons to support everyday social and economic activity in ambiguous spaces undergoing urba…
Development through dispossession: Coffee as mutual aid between Vietnam and East Germany
Following the end of anticolonial warfare in Vietnam, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) joined efforts by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to rebuild the devastated country through construction of new industry and infrastructure. Modernisation projects carried out by the GDR left an enduring imprint on the Vietnamese landscape, serving as evidence of its goodwill practices and solidarity with liberation struggles in the Global…
What is Critical-and Anthropological-about Critical Urban Anthropology
The Things They Carried (and Kept): RevisitingOstalgiein the Global South
The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR g…
Sensing Infrastructure: An Introduction
Christina Schwenkel invites readers to consider the diverse ways our infrastructural worlds are apprehended through the senses to better understand human and nonhuman encounters with infrastructure
Building Socialism: A Conversation
In this first Roadsides conversation essay, Christina Schwenkel and Alessandro Rippa discuss Christina’s recent book, “Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam” (Duke University Press, 2020)
Special Issue: Global Vietnamese Studies
The Affective Turn in Ethnographies of Buddhism
Introduction| October 30 2020 The Affective Turn in Ethnographies of Buddhism: Editors’ Note Christina Schwenkel, Christina Schwenkel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Charles Keith Charles Keith Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2020) 15 (4): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2020.15.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables …
Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam
Socialist Modernism
Research Article| November 01 2019 Socialist Modernism: An Architectural Photo Essay of Everyday Spaces in Hà Nội François Carlet-Soulages, François Carlet-Soulages François Carlet-Soulages is a photographer and professional picture editor. He is founder and project manager at NOI Pictures. Carlet-Soulages started his professional career in 1997 in the Photography Department of BC Editions, before moving to the publishing house Textuel. His work …
Governing through garbage
On December 31, 2010, the municipal dump for the city of Vinh closed even while the new landfill site was still under construction. Over the next weeks, as authorities struggled to find a solution, piles of rotting trash flooded the streets (ngắp đường) at collection points across the city. Scholars have shown how in an age of diminishing public services, trash has emerged as vital materiality around which rights are mobilized and claims to citiz…
Religious Reassemblage and Late Socialist Planning in Urban Vietnam
Recent examinations of religion in postreform Vietnam point to relationships between economic growth and increased ritual activity; some argue that new conditions of precarity have fed the explosion of popular beliefs and investments in a pantheon of spirit beings. Little of this research draws on urban theory, however, and most studies of rituals and festivals remain tied to rural geographies. This essay examines the nexus of urban growth and ri…
Vietnamese in Central Europe
Introduction| February 01 2017 Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2017) 12 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/jvs.2017.12.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools G…
On Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam
Research Article| August 01 2017 On Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the program in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Vietnam on the transnational co-production of memory and the postwar rebuilding of urban infrastructure. Schwenkel i…
Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam
This essay examines encounters between urban infrastructure and the spirit world, or what I am calling "haunted infrastructure." It does so through the case study of an historic pagoda in Vinh City, Vietnam, that was destroyed by US aerial bombing in 1968, leaving only the charred front gate standing. As one of the last visible ruins of war that mark a history of imperial violence to the landscape, the pagoda's remains have been designated a site…
Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artefacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions
A long history of war and revolution in the industrial city of Vinh has perpetuated cycles of mass destruction followed by urban renewal. This paper examines citizen responses to the shift from post-war socialist urbanization that sought to eradicate inequality to post-reform city planning that advocates private property. It asks: how do urban residents at risk of relocation articulate their rights to the post-socialist city? Tracing the use and …
Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam
No material resource and public good is more critical to sustaining urban life than water. During postwar reconstruction in Vietnam, planners showcased urban infrastructure as a spectacular socialist achievement. Water-related facilities, in particular, held the potential for emancipation and modernity. Despite East German-engineered systems, however, taps remained dry in socialist housing. Lack of water exposed existing hierarchies that undermin…
Traveling Architecture. East German Urban Designs in Vietnam
Scholars have long been interested in architecture and urban planning as a cultural battleground during the Cold War. What is less known, however, is how the ideological conflict over urban practices played out beyond the frontlines of Europe on other battlefields abroad. This paper transcends entrenched East/West binaries to examine socialist architectural forms and principles of urban planning that traveled overseas to create experimental citie…
Traveling Architecture
Beyond the Battlefields of Vietnam
There is no dearth of literature on the war in Vietnam; four decades on, the war continues to foment impassioned academic debate. In recent years a new generation of scholars has moved the field of Vietnam War studies in exciting new directions to reconfigure more conventional accounts of history. This can be seen, for example, in the explosion of research on Vietnamese perspectives on the war that have decentered American representations and mem…
Post/Socialist Affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam
This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city in late socialist Vietnam. The setting is the north central city of Vinh, destroyed by aerial bombing during the American War and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung public housing that provided modern, European-style apartments and facil…
Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam
The shift to “market socialism” has brought rapid and profound changes to urban landscapes in Vietnam. Focusing on the fate of socialist architecture and urban design under contemporary urban redevelopment and renewal plans, this essay explores the transformation of Vinh City, capital of the province of Nghệ An, from a center of socialist utopian modernity and postwar urban recovery to a symbol of urban blight and late socialist decay. Destroyed …
Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City by Erik Harms
Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam
No material resource and public good is more critical to sustaining urban life than water. During postwar reconstruction in Vietnam, planners showcased urban infrastructure as a spectacular socialist achievement. Water-related facilities, in particular, held the potential for emancipation and modernity. Despite East German-engineered systems, however, taps remained dry in socialist housing. Lack of water exposed existing hierarchies that undermin…
Post/Socialist Affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam
This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city in late socialist Vietnam. The setting is the north central city of Vinh, destroyed by aerial bombing during the American War and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung public housing that provided modern, European-style apartments and facil…
Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam
Recent years have seen the diversification of knowledge, memory, and meaning at former battlefields and other social spaces that invoke the history of the "American War" in Vietnam. Popular icons of the war have been recycled, reproduced, and consumed in a rapidly growing international tourism industry. The commodification of sites, objects, and imaginaries associated with the war has engendered certain rearticulations of the past in the public s…
Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam
This essay examines encounters between urban infrastructure and the spirit world, or what I am calling "haunted infrastructure." It does so through the case study of an historic pagoda in Vinh City, Vietnam, that was destroyed by US aerial bombing in 1968, leaving only the charred front gate standing. As one of the last visible ruins of war that mark a history of imperial violence to the landscape, the pagoda's remains have been designated a site…
Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam
The shift to “market socialism” has brought rapid and profound changes to urban landscapes in Vietnam. Focusing on the fate of socialist architecture and urban design under contemporary urban redevelopment and renewal plans, this essay explores the transformation of Vinh City, capital of the province of Nghệ An, from a center of socialist utopian modernity and postwar urban recovery to a symbol of urban blight and late socialist decay. Destroyed …
From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability of U.S. Empire
John McCain, once considered a “friend” of Vietnam because of his support for normalized relations with the United States, has since lost his standing. Claims to inhumane treatment and torture while a prisoner in the “Hanoi Hilton” have met with angry denials and calls for more attention to the humanitarian care that McCain and others received. Recent U.S. allegations of human rights abuses in Vietnam following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal have …
Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artefacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions
A long history of war and revolution in the industrial city of Vinh has perpetuated cycles of mass destruction followed by urban renewal. This paper examines citizen responses to the shift from post-war socialist urbanization that sought to eradicate inequality to post-reform city planning that advocates private property. It asks: how do urban residents at risk of relocation articulate their rights to the post-socialist city? Tracing the use and …
Vietnamese in Central Europe
Introduction| February 01 2017 Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2017) 12 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/jvs.2017.12.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools G…
What is Critical-and Anthropological-about Critical Urban Anthropology
The Things They Carried (and Kept): RevisitingOstalgiein the Global South
The rich body of literature on the cultural legacies of East Germany has privileged white German perspectives on material culture at the expense of non-white and non-European encounters with socialist things. In shifting the spatial lens to the global South, and to the foreign students and workers who lived for extended periods in East Germany, I trouble the implicit whiteness in the study of GDR cultural memory. Popular identification with GDR g…
Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Photographic Representation and Transnational Commemoration in Contemporary Vietnam
In April 2000, an exhibit displaying the works of photojournalists killed in action in the Indochinese Wars between 1945 and 1975 opened in Hòò Chíí Minh City. Based on the exhibit and interviews with Vietnamese photographers, this article examines photojournalism on the revolutionary side of the war and its relationship to transnational practices of memory that have transpired in recent years since the normalization of US––Vietnam relations. Whi…
Development through dispossession: Coffee as mutual aid between Vietnam and East Germany
Following the end of anticolonial warfare in Vietnam, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) joined efforts by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to rebuild the devastated country through construction of new industry and infrastructure. Modernisation projects carried out by the GDR left an enduring imprint on the Vietnamese landscape, serving as evidence of its goodwill practices and solidarity with liberation struggles in the Global…
On Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam
Research Article| August 01 2017 On Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the program in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Vietnam on the transnational co-production of memory and the postwar rebuilding of urban infrastructure. Schwenkel i…
The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China
The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China Erik Mueggler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001
Religious Reassemblage and Late Socialist Planning in Urban Vietnam
Recent examinations of religion in postreform Vietnam point to relationships between economic growth and increased ritual activity; some argue that new conditions of precarity have fed the explosion of popular beliefs and investments in a pantheon of spirit beings. Little of this research draws on urban theory, however, and most studies of rituals and festivals remain tied to rural geographies. This essay examines the nexus of urban growth and ri…
Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City by Erik Harms
The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China
The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China Erik Mueggler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001
Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam
Recent years have seen the diversification of knowledge, memory, and meaning at former battlefields and other social spaces that invoke the history of the "American War" in Vietnam. Popular icons of the war have been recycled, reproduced, and consumed in a rapidly growing international tourism industry. The commodification of sites, objects, and imaginaries associated with the war has engendered certain rearticulations of the past in the public s…
Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Photographic Representation and Transnational Commemoration in Contemporary Vietnam
In April 2000, an exhibit displaying the works of photojournalists killed in action in the Indochinese Wars between 1945 and 1975 opened in Hòò Chíí Minh City. Based on the exhibit and interviews with Vietnamese photographers, this article examines photojournalism on the revolutionary side of the war and its relationship to transnational practices of memory that have transpired in recent years since the normalization of US––Vietnam relations. Whi…
The Limits of Kinship: South Vietnamese Households, 1954-1975 . David W. Haines
The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation
Transnational politics of war and remembrance
From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability of U.S. Empire
John McCain, once considered a “friend” of Vietnam because of his support for normalized relations with the United States, has since lost his standing. Claims to inhumane treatment and torture while a prisoner in the “Hanoi Hilton” have met with angry denials and calls for more attention to the humanitarian care that McCain and others received. Recent U.S. allegations of human rights abuses in Vietnam following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal have …
Tours of Vietnam: War, travel guides, and memory
Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation . Harry G. West , Parvathi Raman
Civilizing the City: Socialist Ruins and Urban Renewal in Central Vietnam
The shift to “market socialism” has brought rapid and profound changes to urban landscapes in Vietnam. Focusing on the fate of socialist architecture and urban design under contemporary urban redevelopment and renewal plans, this essay explores the transformation of Vinh City, capital of the province of Nghệ An, from a center of socialist utopian modernity and postwar urban recovery to a symbol of urban blight and late socialist decay. Destroyed …
Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City by Erik Harms
Beyond the Battlefields of Vietnam
There is no dearth of literature on the war in Vietnam; four decades on, the war continues to foment impassioned academic debate. In recent years a new generation of scholars has moved the field of Vietnam War studies in exciting new directions to reconfigure more conventional accounts of history. This can be seen, for example, in the explosion of research on Vietnamese perspectives on the war that have decentered American representations and mem…
Post/Socialist Affect: Ruination and Reconstruction of the Nation in Urban Vietnam
This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city in late socialist Vietnam. The setting is the north central city of Vinh, destroyed by aerial bombing during the American War and rebuilt with assistance from East Germany. A primary focus of urban reconstruction was Quang Trung public housing that provided modern, European-style apartments and facil…
Traveling Architecture. East German Urban Designs in Vietnam
Scholars have long been interested in architecture and urban planning as a cultural battleground during the Cold War. What is less known, however, is how the ideological conflict over urban practices played out beyond the frontlines of Europe on other battlefields abroad. This paper transcends entrenched East/West binaries to examine socialist architectural forms and principles of urban planning that traveled overseas to create experimental citie…
Traveling Architecture
Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artefacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions
A long history of war and revolution in the industrial city of Vinh has perpetuated cycles of mass destruction followed by urban renewal. This paper examines citizen responses to the shift from post-war socialist urbanization that sought to eradicate inequality to post-reform city planning that advocates private property. It asks: how do urban residents at risk of relocation articulate their rights to the post-socialist city? Tracing the use and …
Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam
No material resource and public good is more critical to sustaining urban life than water. During postwar reconstruction in Vietnam, planners showcased urban infrastructure as a spectacular socialist achievement. Water-related facilities, in particular, held the potential for emancipation and modernity. Despite East German-engineered systems, however, taps remained dry in socialist housing. Lack of water exposed existing hierarchies that undermin…
Vietnamese in Central Europe
Introduction| February 01 2017 Vietnamese in Central Europe: An Unintended Diaspora Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2017) 12 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/jvs.2017.12.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools G…
On Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam
Research Article| August 01 2017 On Memory and Materiality in the Study of Vietnam Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel Christina Schwenkel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the program in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Vietnam on the transnational co-production of memory and the postwar rebuilding of urban infrastructure. Schwenkel i…
Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam
This essay examines encounters between urban infrastructure and the spirit world, or what I am calling "haunted infrastructure." It does so through the case study of an historic pagoda in Vinh City, Vietnam, that was destroyed by US aerial bombing in 1968, leaving only the charred front gate standing. As one of the last visible ruins of war that mark a history of imperial violence to the landscape, the pagoda's remains have been designated a site…
Governing through garbage
On December 31, 2010, the municipal dump for the city of Vinh closed even while the new landfill site was still under construction. Over the next weeks, as authorities struggled to find a solution, piles of rotting trash flooded the streets (ngắp đường) at collection points across the city. Scholars have shown how in an age of diminishing public services, trash has emerged as vital materiality around which rights are mobilized and claims to citiz…
Religious Reassemblage and Late Socialist Planning in Urban Vietnam
Recent examinations of religion in postreform Vietnam point to relationships between economic growth and increased ritual activity; some argue that new conditions of precarity have fed the explosion of popular beliefs and investments in a pantheon of spirit beings. Little of this research draws on urban theory, however, and most studies of rituals and festivals remain tied to rural geographies. This essay examines the nexus of urban growth and ri…
Socialist Modernism
Research Article| November 01 2019 Socialist Modernism: An Architectural Photo Essay of Everyday Spaces in Hà Nội François Carlet-Soulages, François Carlet-Soulages François Carlet-Soulages is a photographer and professional picture editor. He is founder and project manager at NOI Pictures. Carlet-Soulages started his professional career in 1997 in the Photography Department of BC Editions, before moving to the publishing house Textuel. His work …
The Affective Turn in Ethnographies of Buddhism
Introduction| October 30 2020 The Affective Turn in Ethnographies of Buddhism: Editors’ Note Christina Schwenkel, Christina Schwenkel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Charles Keith Charles Keith Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2020) 15 (4): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2020.15.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables …
Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam
Sensing Infrastructure: An Introduction
Christina Schwenkel invites readers to consider the diverse ways our infrastructural worlds are apprehended through the senses to better understand human and nonhuman encounters with infrastructure
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (21 works) · Law (19 works) · History (18 works) · Politics (13 works) · History (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Vietnamese (10 works) · Art (9 works)