Mobilizing the Vietnamese Body: Dance Theory, Critical Refugee Studies, and the Aftermaths of War in Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala

Le and Zhu examine the 1999 Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham with regard to dance theory, critical refugee studies, and the aftermaths of war. They provide crossdisciplinary methodologies with which to explore the politicized dimensions of the Vietnamese refugee body-in-motion. Catfish and Mandala reportedly documents, through narrative flashbacks, Pham and his family's experience during and after the war in Vietnam, their escape as boat people, and their lives in the US. These flashbacks are woven into the depiction of his return to Vietnam on a bicycle. Pham places, at the forefront of his account, an emphasis on the moving, meaning-making body. The memoir is a cartography of Vietnamese refugee experiences. His attentiveness to the body, in its kinesthetic and textual mobilization, comprises a refugee literary aesthetics that does much of the heavy theoretical lifting in highlighting and decentering dominant discourses around postwar Vietnam.