Lived Refuge Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience

Reviews

"Lived Refuge allows us to see refugees in a new way. Eschewing the legal or moral representations of what it means to be a 'refugee,' this book explores the affective experiences of refuge. Refugees, we learn, are always working with refuge, and Vinh Nguyen’s engagement with the experiments, negotiations, and refusals of refuge provides a unique window into understanding the multiplicity of ways in which refugee subjectivity is enacted today."—Peter Nyers, McMaster University

"This is a book of and for our times, when roughly one percent of the world’s population is forcibly displaced. Vinh Nguyen gives us a conceptual framework to expose the juridical-political limits of the term 'refugee' by making a compelling case for considering 'refuge' as a defining feature of the human condition in modernity. With uncommon facility, Nguyen articulates the emotive power of forced displacements through stories and the very act of storytelling that registers refuge as a lived experience. In doing so, he invites readers to join in a collective meditation on ways in which conditions of flight and refuge become the very sources of fortitude. Written in haunting, lyrical prose with Walter Benjamin’s urgency and Raymond Williams’ political deft and precision, Nguyen’s illuminating and generative study marks a milestone, a major turning point in migration studies at large."—B. Venkat Mani, Professor of German and World Literatures and Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Senior Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin—Madison and author of Cosmopolitical Claims and Recoding World Literature

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