Kontakt
Refugeography, Politics of Mobility and Liminal Refugee Identities in Contemporary Vietnamese American Literature
This dissertation project seeks to discover how the politics of mobility dictates refugees’ movements and affects how they negotiate questions of belonging, and does so by examining novels and short stories written by contemporary Vietnamese American authors. Counteracting simplified portrayals that construct refugees as passive and helpless, these narratives of the 1.5 and second generation—which confront issues of displacement, ethnic discrimination and trauma—demonstrate determined Vietnamese American self-representations, stressing the possibility of empowering refugee subjectivities despite imposed social and political constraints. Additionally, in order to extract more differentiated accounts of various refugee experiences and the workings of liminal identities, this project will benefit from the vital combination of concepts from Mobility Studies and Critical Refugee Studies. Through the lens of Vietnamese American literary productions, the aim of this interdisciplinary project is thus to consider refugee subjectivities and scrutinize the material conditions and political contexts of displacement, while also establishing a critical framework for the discussion of refugee literature that enables me to focus on forced mobility as well as immobility.