Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto

by Eric Tang

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 What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, History, School, Politics, Academic, Asian American

242 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2015

About the author

Eric Tang is an Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and director of the Center for Asian American Studies. He also directs the undergraduate major, Race, Indigeneity, and Migration. His first book, titled Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015), is an ethnographic account of refugee life in some of New York City’s most impoverished and socially marginalized neighborhoods. A former community organizer, Tang has published several articles on race and urban social movements, including award-winning writing on post-Katrina New Orleans.

Reviews

[Ernest Keefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my work/volunteering with refugee resettlement, I was reticent to think about the ways in which we enacted and continued settler colonial violence, specifically in the ways where we go along with the demands of the state and its insistence on permanent settlement in the United States in ways that would eventually remove them from Medicaid and other social support structures. This book demonstrates clearly the ways in which violence is enacted through social work and the systems surrounding that work and how through promoting the idea of 'refugee exceptionalism', resettlement agencies create sites of vulnerability for their clients. The violence that the state enacts on refugees is an extension of the way that the state enacts violence upon Black people in the form of incarceration, poverty and neoliberal solutions to the social ills of racism. How can refugee resettlement be done in a way that does not exceptionalize? How can it be done in a way that seeks to destruct the systems of colonialism and violence that do not end once the refugee reaches America's borders? Refugee resettlement is inherently intertwined with the state and agencies are forced to comply with the will of the state in order to receive funding, even if that means harming the very people the agency seeks to protect. These agencies will continue to promote violence, despite best intentions, as long as they are tied to the US settler colonial project. The future of refugee resettlement, of welcoming the stranger, must sever its ties to state violence if it is to survive. It must imagine new possibilities of welcoming that do not serve as continual waves of violence. I'm not sure what that will look like. But it can't look like this.

[el · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just spectacular.

"However, refugee exceptionalism never actually removes the refugee from hyperghetto spaces and institutions (certainly not in any material sense); on the contrary, it requires that she be held in perpetual captivity so that she can be used over and over again." (14)

"I offer these methodological reflections neither to qualify my findings nor to make axiomatic claims about the possibilities and limitations of ethnographic research...Ra and I certainly held a personal affinity for one another based on a mutual trust developed over several years. However, feelings of friendship and trust should not be misconstrued as factors mitigating power differentials." (26)

"Refugee resettlement in the United States was a matter of American largesse, not redress." (40)

"Why was I invested in the refugee's clean break, even if she herself had deemed it untenable and irrelevant?" (50)

"That RAND played a key role in Southeast Asian counterinsurgency and urban American postinsurrection research reveals the clear connections between U.S. liberal warfare abroad and at home." (59)

"R was determined to get the landlord's attention, however. Her life in the camp had taught her the value of being boisterous, of being the type of captive who harangued administrators at every turn." (68)

"I would be hard-pressed to find a sociological rendering that recognizes the refugee camp as the periphery and the hyperghetto as its core. My point in calling for this kind of world-systems interpretation is to insist not on a one-size-fits-all rendering of global migration but on an analysis that accounts for the refugee's deliberate routing to the hyperghetto. In other words, I call for an analysis of refugee migration that moves beyond refugee exeptionalism's suggestion that the refugee is only incidentally in the hyperghetto toward a serious consideration of the centrality of the hyperghetto to the global circuit of advanced capitalism. Such an analysis also encourages us to take seriously the liberal warfare carried out in the hyperghetto- to understand that housing, punitive welfare, policing, and mass incarceration are not merely domestic problems but global contradictions." (127)

"Refugee temporality is not another way of stating that the refugee is haunted by the past—through trauma or survivor guilt. Instead, it is the distinct way in which refugees know that the power of their past captivities remains in the present—in the supposed land of salvation that promised them safety and freedom." (173)

[vic · Rating 5 out of 5]

brief words- i'm thinking about how when we talk about asian americans in the united states we have to talk about blackness, about the refugee as constantly in motion and serving as collateral damage for u.s. imperialism, about globalization, and about the distinctions between intergenerational silence/trauma of most migrants and the overtly felt, external state violence/trauma that never really ends for refugees (and is anything but silent). so all of that is messy but this work is very important, and i'd rec this 100%

[Brendan Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books is excellent in so many ways, but what I found most enjoyable about it is that it blends academic writing with storytelling. I tend to not enjoy overly academic works, but I found the prose in this really approachable and learned so much in the process of reading it.

[Isha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to finish this book after being assigned to read it for class. The way Tang describes refugee temporality, movement and refugee exceptionalism through the use of Ra’s story is poetic and heartbreaking. I felt I learned so much about how US global relations and INTERVENTIONS create the very conditions that help produce the “refugee.” How it then affects the domestic — similar to the how the public sphere intrudes in the private space of the refugee and others living in the hyper ghettos like African Americans and Latinos. It’s a story intersecting race and class in a way that highlights the complex ways they work together to justify refugee and working class mistreatment by the system.

It’s also really helpful when thinking of solidarity and organizing. Highly recommend.

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

***NOTE: these reviews are reading responses that are slightly amended from my course assignments for CPLN 624: Readings in Race, Poverty, and Place.

Eric Tang’s Unsettled is an exercise in “activist-oriented scholarship”, where he partners with a woman, Ra Pronh, to share her experience as a Cambodian immigrant and resident of various parts of the Northwest Bronx, a place he and other academics call the “hyperghetto.”

Eric explains that the hyperghetto is a “neo-plantation,” or the modern continuation of slavery due to the way this location captures people of color in an unrelenting system of punishment and poverty. He argues that the hyperghetto is a place society believes only Black people can (permanently) reside in. This, he argues, is why despite their immense struggles, Cambodian refugees were subject to “refugee exceptionalism”, a phenomenon where policy makers, landlords, and social workers believed they were “in the hyperghetto, but not of it.”

In many ways, this book unravels the neat, progressive narrative of resettlement often touted for Asian-Americans: because of our country’s deep disfunction, each year in America bore even more setbacks for Ra. We come to understand that she sees her displacement from Cambodia due to genocide and her many displacements in New York as a continual state of warfare: against the Khmer Rouge, then Bronx slumlords, then the welfare system, and so on. Eric defines this continual state as refugee temporality, the refugee’s knowledge that each displacement/resettlement draws on an old form of power that is continually cemented in their lives. Embracing this alternative sense of time helped Ra “resist the salvation narratives” people asked her to tell about her experiences with imperialism and the hyperghetto.

For me, the most heartbreaking part of Eric and Ra’s necessary breakdown of this “false timeline” was the generational challenges of second and third-generation Cambodians. This is first clear in the generational differences in Cambodian activism. Eric describes how teen activists wanted to make various demands of the welfare system, and their parents essentially warned them that change is only possible by moving away from your issue. This resignation is the wisdom of people who have lived and suffered under the hands not just of Communist armies, but also under capitalist governments. By the end of the story, we see that the first-generation refugees’ belief in the neverending downward movement of life has extended to their children and grandchildren, who have their own host of economic, incarceration, and other challenges. Despite Eric and the Pronhs all meeting through community organizing, it’s deeply upsetting to hear that only Eric was able to continue this work, largely because he has a job that pays him to do so. The limited mobility of many people of color (even those not living in the hyperghetto) is something more researchers are starting to address. However, as Unsettled shows, we are a long way off from giving people reason and time to trust that our system can ever be reformed.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an enlightening, provocative, and important book. I like how Tang traces Ra Pronh's life experience from Cambodia to the US based on years of research with her. However, Tang left me behind when he used specialized jargon or made arguments refuting previous scholars' work I wasn't familiar with. Of course Ra does not think of herself in the context of neoliberalism or late caplitalism. Like most of us, she's unaware of these terms/eras. I also need to educate myself about how prevalent the idea is that slavery continues to this day, just in a new form. I didn't always agree with Tang's conclusions or point of view but still appreciate his work and the questions it engendered in my own mind.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little hard to read as far as writing styles go but the content is something everyone should be faced with and aware of. Recommend if you like history, foreign, policy, sociology, interpersonal perspective, observations of how broken the system is or everyday stories of resistance and community organizing.

[Enkuush · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing book. came up in two classes: one about Asian Americans, another on refugees. hard recommend for anyone interested in urban spaces, SE Asian history, refugees and more generally, the lives of people who exist on the margins.

[jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

?????!!!!! reread asap

[Cassie Widdison-Simmons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and incredibly important issues to be aware of. It was somewhat repetitive.

[Pam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an interesting and needed book; I only gave it two stars because of its repetitiveness and excessive use of academic jargon. That said, however, this book fills an important gap -- a long-term follow-up looking at how refugees resettled in the United States (in this case, from Cambodia) actually fare. Although the stories in this book are specific to Cambodia, some useful parallels are drawn in the end to subsequent waves of refugees. And even more usefully, challenges common to these "new Americans" and African-Americans are clear.

[James Huynh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this book and learning about Ra Pronh's story within the contexts of the nation-state construction of refugee. Tang pushes back on the nation of linearity that exists in the refugee-resettlement framework.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guilt doesn't even begin to describe what has been done.