The Archive as Infrastructure: Vietnamese Refugee Nonarrival, Visual Capture, and Erasure in Hong Kong Colonial Police Photography and Dinh Q. Lê’s <i>Erasure</i> (2011)

Abstract This article examines colonial Hong Kong as a US border outpost during the Vietnamese refugee crisis, during which the city processed 195,833 Vietnamese asylum seekers between 1975 and 1997. After 1982, Hong Kong implemented a “closed camp” policy, which led to colonial police carrying out daily oceanic interceptions that became de facto remote immigration control for the United States. This policy change made nonarrival the experience for many oceanic refugees in Hong Kong and was central to the US pivot to humanitarianism as a practice of liberal empire in the Pacific. The article traces this shift through an archive of nonarrival: interception photographs of empty oceanic refugee vessels, which underscore colonial photography as a visual technology of dehumanization and racialized identity making. Developing a concept of “archive as infrastructure,” this article argues that visual policing was an important component in the ideological and material building of US, British, and Hong Kong offshored, transnational migration infrastructure. The article concludes with a reading of Dinh Q. Lê’s multimedia installation and digital archive Erasure (2011), which uses found photographs to engage ephemerality as a counterarchival response to the dehumanizing nonarrival enacted in the colonial state's aesthetics of bureaucratic rationality and visual capture.