Theorizing Refugee-Indigenous Solidarities across the Refugee Settler Condition
October 19, 2022
What happens when refugees encounter Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the countries of their resettlement? In this talk, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, traces the postwar migration of Vietnamese refugees to Guam and Israel-Palestine in order to unpack 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. Putting critical refugee studies in conversation with Indigenous and settler colonial studies, she highlights emergent forms of refugee-Indigenous solidarity that address the structural antagonisms created by the refugee settler condition. Throughout the talk, she proposes an archipelagic method for ethnic studies, putting the Vietnamese concept of nước, which means water/country/homeland, in conversation with Pacific Islander and Palestinian understandings of the archipelago to enact a relational praxis.