Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine

by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

Overview

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What happens when refugees encounter Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the countries of their resettlement? 

From April to November 1975, the US military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on the unincorporated territory of Guam; from 1977 to 1979, the State of Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi analyzes these two cases to theorize what she calls the refugee settler condition: the fraught positionality of refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. This groundbreaking book explores two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire, examining how the Vietnam War is linked to the US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of Israel, and second, corresponding archipelagos of trans-Indigenous resistance, tracing how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Considering distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, Gandhi offers tools for imagining emergent forms of decolonial solidarity between refugee settlers and Indigenous peoples. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520379657
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Series:	American Crossroads , #65
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction. Nu'ó'c: Archipelogics and Land/Water Politics 1

Part 1 Mapping Sources: Archipelagic Histories and Fluid Frontiers

1 Archipelagic History: Vietnam, Palestine, Guam, 1967-1975 21

2 The "New Frontier": Settler Imperial Prefigurations and Afterlives of the US War in Vietnam 51

Part 2 Tracing Migrations: Archipelagos of Settler Colonialism, us Empire, and Refugee Refusal

3 Operation New Life: Vietnamese Refugees and US Settler Militarism in Guam 79

4 Refugees in a State of Refuge: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question of Palestine 102

Part 3 Unsettling Resettlements: Archipelagos of Decolonization Across Guam, Israel-Palestine, and Vietnam

5 The Politics of Staying: The Permanent/Transient Temporality of Settler Militarism in Guam 133

6 The Politics of Translation: Competing Rhetorics of Return in Israel-Palestine and Vietnam 157

Afterword. Floating Islands: Refugee Futurities and Decolonial Horizons 185

Notes 191

Bibliography 237

Index 257