Aug 27, 2020

It is with mixed feelings that the Rhetoric Department congratulates Trinh Minh-ha on her retirement commencing July 1, 2020.  Minh-ha joined Berkeley as a professor in 1994 but served as Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor in 1992.  She was an active member of the Departments of Rhetoric and Gender and Women’s Studies at the time of her retirement and also taught in the Program in Film Studies from 1994-2002.  She was also affiliated with the Departments of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, African American Studies and Ethnic Studies.

Minh-ha will be greatly missed as a colleague and a dedicated teacher.  Belying her unassuming and quiet demeanor, Minh-ha is the most globally recognized scholar and filmmaker in the arts and humanities at Berkeley.  Her prominent films include Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Reassemblage (1982), A Tale of Love (1995) and most recently, Forgetting Vietnam (2015).  Her seminal books in visual, cultural, feminist and postcolonial studies include Woman, Native, Other. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989), When the Moon Waxes Red.  Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (1991), and Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (2011).  Her work has been shown in the most prestigious international art events such as Documenta (2002) and the Biennale of the Whitney Museum of American Art and at leading film festivals.  Her work has also entered the permanent collections of leading archives and museums such as The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science Film Archive, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Tate Modern (London), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).  Her films have been the subject of 62 retrospectives world-wide, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2017), the Tate Modern (2006) and the Jeu de Paume Museum (Galerie Nationale de l’Image) (2008).

Thank you, Minh-ha, it has been a pleasure and honor to share this time with you.  We wish her well as she continues her scintillating path that includes a feature-length film on rural China, forthcoming retrospectives and surveys of her work in Seoul, Marseilles, Hamburg, and Shanghai, and five more new film projects to date….