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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more
at www.luminosoa.org. 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
Le 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.
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