https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6417-7072
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Thu Nguyen, Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. By Vinh Nguyen, Journal of Refugee Studies, 2025;, feaf020, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaf020
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What does ‘being a refugee’ mean? When does one stop being a refugee? In Lived Refuge, Vinh Nguyen (2023) attempts to problematize the seemingly clear and concrete legal–political definition of ‘refugee’ by closely reading literary works, poems, activism, and even deviances by Southeast Asian refugees. In doing so, Nguyen wishes to explore the concept of refuge experientially—he sees the act of storytelling, whether through writing or other forms, as a means to ‘make sense of being a refugee and living in refuge’ (xv). This way, the author participates in a tradition seeking to highlight the agency of refugees vis-a-vis the mechanistic state-sanctioned status. His main thesis is that the concept of refugee should be relational (instead of individualistic in the legal-political definition), continuous (instead of having a potential end date), dynamic (instead of an identity), and experiential (instead of a mere paperwork status).
As part of the critical refugee studies tradition, where refugees are not conceptualized as an ‘object of investigation’, but as ‘intentionalized beings who possess and enact their own politics’ (Espiritu 2014: 10–11), Nguyen highlights the affects, actions, and stories of refugees as an alternative to a state-centered approach. Scholars of this tradition, such as Yen Le Espiritu, often highlight the value of refugees’ oral histories, whereby refugees memorialize their journey through the act of telling (Chapter 5 in her seminal book, Body Counts, is a classic example of this). Yet, in this book, the author differs in going beyond (collective) memory as a mechanism of refugee agency—he argues that an overreliance on memory fixes the refugee as one who must remember (or forget), thereby ‘reif[ying] [their] place (…) within a national and transnational schema’ (22). To be clear, this does not mean Nguyen is hostile to the memory project. Rather, the worry of reification here is rooted from the constant imposition of refugees as subjects who must remember something distinct from the state they fled. In other words, refugees’ subjectivity is defined by memory, concrete, and unchangeable, without thoroughly considering the complex process through which such a memory came to be.
