UC San Diego

My dissertation addresses the absence of the Secret War and environmental racism in Cold War histories. I show how U.S. Cold War logics of "containment" were linked to the production of making "debris," which was strategically contained in Laos. This research asks the following questions : 1) how was Laos designated and made to serve as a U.S. military wasteland?; and 2) how does the persistence of war bear on the material environment? Through archival materials, literary analysis, and analysis of cultural texts, my study highlights the racialized construction of Laos as "nonplace" in order to naturalize violence and justify the U.S. aerial war. I argue Laos' battered landscape and military waste left behind reveals how forgetting the U.S. war and violence in the country is impossible because the debris encroaches, disrupts and inhabits the lives of Laotians and the land. This dissertation comprises two parts. Part 1 examines the symbolic violence of war to reveal the racial, gendered and spatialized process that enabled U.S. bombings in Laos with impunity. Part 2 examines the material violence of war to reveal how military waste have been domesticated or revitalized for tourist consumption. This dissertation brings together critical geography, war/humanitarian discourse, and postcolonial studies frameworks, but fundamentally I situate my work in critical refugee studies, environmental studies, Ethnic Studies and American Studies that conceptualizes the Secret War in Laos as a critical moment in U.S. imperial dominance during the Cold War