Ecocide as Public Depression in Vietnam: Recuperating a Feeling of Animacy Through Moving Imagery

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s recent video installation, My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017), suggests that human-nonhuman relations are at an impasse. In this riveting piece, two animal spirits of sub-species that have recently gone extinct in Vietnam – the Javan rhino and a giant turtle – debate the possibility of animal liberation from humankind. Vietnam is a country with one of the most complex natural ecosystems on the planet, but a substantial number of its species are at risk of extinction. It has suffered devastating histories of ecocide, for example, with the American military’s employment of Agent Orange in its rainforests during the US-Indochina War. Such environmental catastrophes have often accompanied longer histories of colonial violence in the region. Nowadays animal extinctions have accelerated, moreover, due to human trophy kills, poaching for “medicinal” purposes, and neocolonial development of the land.

In this paper, I argue that My Ailing Beliefs registers such an impasse in human-nonhuman relations as a feeling of historically mired public depression, but one that may incite renewed, more ethically bound forms of affiliation between animals and humans. I borrow from queer/affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich’s terms – “archive of feeling,” “public depression,” and “impasse” – to suggest that Nguyen’s suspenseful, fast-paced video installation works to animate public feelings for change in Vietnam and beyond. Such a feeling of animacy, derived in part from longer indigenous-Buddhist beliefs in the animacy of nonhuman beings, might provoke current publics to resist growing environmental devastation and ecocide in the region.