Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience (Critical Refugee Studies)

by Vinh Nguyen

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In a world increasingly shaped by displacement and migration, refuge is both a coveted right and an elusive promise for millions. While conventionally understood as legal protection, it also transcends judicial definitions. In Lived Refuge , Vinh Nguyen reconceptualizes refuge as an ongoing affective experience and lived relation rather than a fixed category with legitimacy derived from the state.
 
Focusing on Southeast Asian diasporas in the wake of the Vietnam War, Nguyen examines three affective experiences—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to reveal the actively lived dimensions of refuge. Through multifaceted analyses of literary and cultural productions, Nguyen argues that the meaning of refuge emerges from how displaced people negotiate the kinds of safety and protection that are offered to (and withheld from) them. In so doing, he lays the framework for an original and compelling understanding of contemporary refugee subjectivity.

184 pages, Paperback

Published November 14, 2023

About the author

VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator. His writing appears in Brick, LitHub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Ricepaper, The Criterion Collection, and MUBI Notebook. He is a non-fiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is also a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books.

Vinh is the author and co-editor of three academic books: Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada, The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. He is a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee + Migration Studies Network Canada and co-edits passages, a book series for Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

He served as a cultural consultant for the hit CBC comedy Run the Burbs and as a historical consultant on the “Vietnamese Boat People, 1979-1981” Heritage Minute. His writing has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and has received the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Non-fiction for emerging LGBTQ writers. In 2024, he was a writer-in-residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House. Vinh was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and lives in Toronto, Canada.

Reviews

[Matea Polojac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for class

[Christopher Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly perceptive and stunningly beautiful. By focusing on the experiments of refugees with forms of refuge and state sponsorship, this book creates an unrelenting rebuttal to narratives of the "good" and "deserving" refugee and prioritizes the urgency for anti-war and anti-colonial action.