Experiments in Skin

“Experiments in Skin is a fully dazzling treatment of the aftermaths of the Vietnam War. Working expertly at the intersection of military history, chemical warfare, modern medical research, race, dermatology, beauty, and skin, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu tells a fascinating and important story about how contemporary Vietnamese beauty culture has arisen from an ugly history of US militarism—the afterlife of warfare in its enduring marks on Vietnamese skin as well as military efforts to heal and even perfect soldiers' skin. Tu renders extraordinary insight into the tightly entwined histories of militarized technology and a rising beauty culture, giving name to whole new territories for analysis.” — Matthew Frye Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History, Yale University

“Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu advances a theory of aesthetics and politics that is urgently relevant to contemporary postcolonial theorizations of colonial modernity and the resistance to it. By historicizing the emergence of dermatology in the context of American empire and war, Experiments in Skin embodies the best of cultural studies methodology and analysis.” — Jennifer Terry, author of Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America