Journal of Transnational American Studies

Best known for “Notes on Camp” and “On Photography,” the writer and critic Susan Sontag also spoke out vehemently against US imperialism in Vietnam. During the late 1960s, she not only spoke and wrote against the War—at least once, she was accompanied in her acts of protest by an antiwar Green Beret, at other times, by like-minded poets, artists, and writers—she also traveled to Hanoi to meet face to face with the revolutionary forces of North Vietnam. Her essay, “Trip to Hanoi,” declares that “radical Americans profited from the war in Vietnam [which gave them] a clear-cut moral issue on which to mobilize discontent and expose the camouflaged contradictions in the system.” Once in Hanoi as a war witness, Sontag became disturbed by the mismatch between her intellectual position of solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution and her shocking inability to develop an emotional connection to the Vietnamese people themselves. Seeking to explain and resolve this gap, she focused inward. Her Hanoi essay leaves out precisely those details about the external world that other travel writers tried to emphasize. Sontag’s turn toward self-reflection in Vietnam comprised a subtle yet powerful alternative method of analyzing and interpreting US imperialism that served her well decades later when, in a special issue of The New Yorker, she denounced the Bush Administration’s war-mongering response to the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center.