ABOUT THIS BOOK

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. Linh Thủy Nguyễn's analysis reveals that present experiences of economic insecurity and racism also shape these narratives of familial loss.

Developing a theory of intergenerational trauma, Nguyễn rethinks how U.S. imperialism, the discourse of communism, and assimilation impacted families across generations. Through ethnic studies and feminist and queer-of-color critique, Displacing Kinship offers a critical approach for reading family tensions and interpersonal conflict as affective investments informed by the material, structural conditions of white supremacy and racial capitalism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Linh Thủy Nguyễn is Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Associate in the Center for Southeast Asia and Its Diasporas and the Harry Bridges Labor Center at the University of Washington.

REVIEWS

“In Displacing Kinship, Linh Thủy Nguyễn makes a crucial contribution to reframing the narrativization of familial or intergenerational trauma in second-generation storytelling and cultural politics. Against the capture of history, so often depicted as a pathological stillness or unbearable void between parent and child, Nguyễn argues that narrowing the etiology of refugee trauma to war and flight eclipses other forms of violence—white supremacy and racial capitalism, among others—that are just as present as rupture or ruin. A deeply satisfying work of aesthetic study, Displacing Kinship renders more complexly the presence of trauma in our accounts of the afterlives of refugees.”—Mimi Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages and The Promise of Beauty

“A long history of racial exclusion made the family romance an impossible ideal for most Asian immigrants. In the brilliant Displacing Kinship, Linh Thủy Nguyễn reconsiders this history in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In order to redeem the traumatic violence of mass death and destruction it had enacted, the United States began fetishizing family reunification for Vietnamese refugees, giving rise to a new affective and material practice for racial subjection precisely as assimilation and national belonging.”—David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Displacing Kinship: The Trauma of Assimilation and the Affects of Empire

1. Attractive Families: Assimilation and the Sociological Containment of Race

2. Ambivalent Attachments: Orienting toward Family in Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do

3. “Like a Fucked Family”: Intergenerational and Queer Vietnamese Traumas

4. Embodying Memory and Remembering Race

Epilogue: Shattered Relationalities, Fetishizing Trauma, and the Task of Representation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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