“In Displacing Kinship, Linh Thủy Nguyễn makes a crucial contribution to reframing the narrativization of familial or intergenerational trauma in second-generation storytelling and cultural politics. Against the capture of history, so often depicted as a pathological stillness or unbearable void between parent and child, Nguyễn argues that narrowing the etiology of refugee trauma to war and flight eclipses other forms of violence—white supremacy and racial capitalism, among others—that are just as present as rupture or ruin. A deeply satisfying work of aesthetic study, Displacing Kinship renders more complexly the presence of trauma in our accounts of the afterlives of refugees.”—Mimi Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages and The Promise of Beauty
“A long history of racial exclusion made the family romance an impossible ideal for most Asian immigrants. In the brilliant Displacing Kinship, Linh Thủy Nguyễn reconsiders this history in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In order to redeem the traumatic violence of mass death and destruction it had enacted, the United States began fetishizing family reunification for Vietnamese refugees, giving rise to a new affective and material practice for racial subjection precisely as assimilation and national belonging.”—David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans