Southeast Asian Diaspora Studies

Countering the idea of Hmong women as victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking volume demonstrate how the prevailing scholarly emphasis on Hmong culture and men as the primary culprits of women's subjugation perpetuates the perception of a Hmong premodern status and renders unintelligible women's nuanced responses to patriarchal strategies of domination both in the United States and in Southeast Asia. Claiming Place expands knowledge about the Hmong lived reality while contributing to broader conversations on sexuality, diaspora, and agency.

Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its consequences through creative work. Displacing Kinship examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization. Second-generation texts illustrate how the children of refugees from Vietnam are haunted by trauma and a violent, ever-present, but mostly unarticulated past.

The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation," usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.

Cambodian history is Cold War history, asserts Y-Dang Troeung in Refugee Lifeworlds. Constructing a genealogy of the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, Troeung mines historical archives and family anecdotes to illuminate the refugee experience, and the enduring impact of war, genocide, and displacement in the lives of Cambodian people.  Troeung, a child of refugees herself, employs a method of autotheory that melds critical theory, autobiography, and textual analysis to examine the work of contemporary artists, filmmakers, and authors.

A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen.

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what preface author Shirley Geok-Lin Lim describes as a leap over the barbed fences that have kept these women apart in these, our United States of America.

After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and '90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty.   Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the "hyperghetto." He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life.  Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery's afterlife?

What are the stories Southeast Asians carry from the Mekong to the Mississippi? In Minnesota's first Southeast Asian-authored anthology of stories, poetry and artwork, the Southeast Asian diaspora storytelling (SEADS) initiative aims to reclaim, honor and amplify the lived experiences of veterans, mothers, activists, scholars and other historically invisible narratives of Hmong, Khmer, Lao and Vi't community members. From childhood sweethearts to memories of the CIA secret armies, to first winters in Minnesota these stories explore long-buried edges of war and grief, memories and the resilience to rebuild and reimagine the lives our elders believe we could have for ourselves. The high costs and the unexpected treasures. These stories leave the reader with a renewed sense of hope and an understanding of the urgency for everyone to learn from our shared history so that future generations do not have to repeat it.