Our Hearts and Minds: (Post) Refugee Affect and the War in Viet Nam

Abstract

Our Hearts and Minds examines how the “figure of the refugee”—as an analytic—both illuminates and complicates conventional understandings of nationhood, citizenship, and belonging, and in doing so, imagines alternative ways to think about history as well as socio-political formations to come. Through analyses of literary and cultural productions, my interdisciplinary project reconceptualizes “refugee” as a condition of subjectivity, as opposed to a legal category, a political anomaly, or a historical experience empty of rights and values. Taking the context of the War in Viet Nam, and the Southeast Asian diasporas that have resulted from it, as my case study, I focus on three affective categories—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to explore how refugees remember, represent, and embody forced migration and its afterlife. Affect, I suggest, is an important means of turning to the bodies that migrate—its contacts, attachments, intensities, potentialities—as well as the forms of relationality and sociality that enable the refugee’s positioning in the world. Reading a range of texts including novels, short fiction, memoir, poetry, activist performance, and art videos, my research develops a critical framework for understanding refugee passages through the lens of feeling and embodiment, emotion and collectivity. This focus on affect departs from, and challenges, a field of refugee studies that take refugees as “objects of investigation” as well as popular modes of representation that characterize them as pitiful, identity-less mass. I center the textures of subjectivity and embodied experience, suggesting that rather than being restrictive and/or constrictive of diasporic lives, identities, and epistemologies, the refugee designation, or a sense of refugeeness, is valuable in making sense of entangled processes of war, migration, and diaspora. I contend that gratitude, resentment, and resilience are not only inevitable affective structures of American militarism overseas, they also illuminate the conditions of possibility crucial for the work of survival and memory-work in its wake.