(Un)making Refugee: Beyond a Discourse of Humanity

Abstract

This dissertation (un)makes refugee by dissecting the hegemonic discourses that construct the legal refugee figure as an immigrant category. To do so, I trace the emergence of the Vietnamese American refugee subject in U.S. history. The era in which Vietnamese refugees were resettled to the U.S. nation coincides with American struggles for civil rights. Yet, this history is often neglected when the Vietnamese refugee subject is situated in a white savior discourse that depicts refugees as perpetual victims and purports America as the benefactor and desired land of refuge for displaced populations. Although many individuals—including those from Haiti, Guatemala, and El Salvador—in the late twentieth century sought refugee status in the United States, no other population was as widely admitted as Vietnamese refugees. Contrary to the white savior rhetoric, this dissertation exposes that Vietnamese were granted refugee status over other populations in order to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives. The Vietnamese American refugee subject could fit into the established “model minority” myth because they were passive, submissive, and apolitical victims—as depicted in the legal studies on Vietnamese in Southeast Asian refugee camps in the late twentieth century—in ways that other populations of asylum seekers could not. To challenge the narrative of passivity, this dissertation offers a framework of the active refugee to look for the ways in which contemporary Vietnamese American authors write possibility and pleasures and theorize freedom and joy in refugee life: in camps and in resettlement. An analysis of contemporary Vietnamese American literature offers new ways of understanding Vietnamese American refugee subjectivity as one who claims the space in-between—in which refugee logic does not fit into U.S. land-based logics of belonging but rather exposes the contradictions of what it means to claim the space beyond the margins. I propose that Vietnamese American refugee subjectivity is not a fixed identity but a queer formation, one that is always in flux. I attribute the dynamicism of this subjectivity to the revolutionary women of twentieth-century Vietnamese society, who have continually challenged hegemonic gender roles. As an intervention into critical refugee studies, this dissertation brings together the fields of Black feminism, critical refugee studies, and Vietnamese American studies to illuminate the importance of Black lives in the making of Vietnamese American refugee subjectivity. I argue that the legal definition of refugee serves to reify boundaries of belonging dictated by the nation-state, in which to bring the refugee back into the discourse of national belonging through the framework of humanity negates that “human” is a gendered and racialized subject in the U.S. national imaginary. This dissertation uncovers how the legal refugee figure, which rests on preconceived notions of the human, is grounded in a hierarchy of humanity where the very idea of human requires a negation of Blackness. To move beyond a discourse of humanity, I uncover how contemporary Vietnamese American authors resignify refugee and rewrite belonging as not affixed to land-based logics of the nation-state but in the ethical possibilities of co-relationality, in one another.