Chemical Diasporas: Tracing Toxicity through Ecological Kinship

Agent Orange is commonly known as the main chemical compound that was used in herbicidal warfare during the Vietnam-American War; however, the geographies of chemical spread extend beyond Southeast Asia. This book, Chemical Diasporas: Tracing Toxicity through Ecological Kinship introduces the concept of a chemical diaspora as an infrastructure that traces the movement of toxicants as a network of harm but also a source of political solidarity. Through archival analyses of US military maps and toxicology reports, cultural analyses of visual and performance art created by queer and disabled diasporic Vietnamese artists in response to herbicide exposure, and over fifteen years of community-engaged research in the U.S. and Vietnam, the book traces how exposed communities have forged new relationships with multispecies environments in the aftermath of exposure. The book centers a disability studies analysis in order to intervene in extant studies that equate disability and all nonnormative embodiments with evidence of harm. Rather, Chemical Diasporas argues that sensory relations between bodies opens up alternate routes for building political solidarity across divisions of race, class, citizenship, and species, to usher in alternate possibilities for imagining reparation, rehabilitation, and restoration in a time of multiple ongoing exposures.