The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages

Recently, there’s been a wave of new critical work on Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literature, culture, and the refugee/immigrant experience. Here is a preview of Mimi Thi Nguyen’s monograph, Next Wave, that reads the Vietnamese refugee history through questioning the United States’ claims of freedom.

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The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages

by Mimi Thi Nguyen
Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies Series
Duke University Press

ISBN-13: 978-0822352396
September 21, 2012

304 pages
4 photographs

 

 

From the Publisher
In The Gift of Freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen develops a new understanding of contemporary United States empire and its self-interested claims to provide for others the advantage of human freedom. Bringing together critiques of liberalism with postcolonial approaches to the modern cartography of progress, Nguyen proposes “the gift of freedom” as the name for those forces that avow to reverence aliveness and beauty, and to govern an enlightened humanity, while producing new subjects and actions—such as a grateful refugee, or enduring war—in an age of liberal empire. From the Cold War to the global war on terror, the United States simultaneously promises the gift of freedom through war and violence, and administers the debt that follows. Focusing here on the figure of the Vietnamese refugee as the twice-over target of the gift of freedom—first through war, second through refuge—Nguyen suggests that the imposition of debt precludes the subjects of freedom from escaping those colonial histories that deemed them “unfree.” To receive the gift of freedom then is to be indebted to empire, perhaps without end.

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Empire of Freedom [read an excerpt in .pdf]
1. The Refugee Condition
2. Grace, the Gift of the Girl in the Photograph
3. Race Wars, Patriot Acts
Epilogue. Refugee Returns
Notes
Bibliography
Index

A Review
“The Gift of Freedom is a dazzling book. Focusing on the figure of the Vietnamese refugee as a key to comprehending how the rhetoric of U.S. liberalism and freedom became hegemonic during the Cold War and in the contemporary post-9/11 period, Mimi Thi Nguyen offers an original approach to rethinking Cold War politics and U.S. liberal freedom.”—David L. Eng, author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

About The Author
Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She continues to understand her scholarship through the frame of transnational feminist cultural studies, and in particular as an untangling of the liberal way of war that pledges “aid,” freedom, rights, movement, and other social goods, with her following project on the obligations of beauty. She is a coeditor of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. I am thrilled that there is a critical examination of the “freedom” being offered by liberal Western economies, and how it comes with a legacy of indebtedness and yes, a losing of our cultural authenticity.
    The only way to transcend this inheritance of servitude is to be come authentic individuals, who encompass our own personal stories and are willing to carry that baggage or gift on our bodies.
    I’ve put this book on my to-read list.

    • lots of important new books by Vietnamese scholars coming out, or about Vietnamese culture. glad to see that you’re interested in them.

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