UC Berkeley

Archipelago of Resettlement charts the routes and roots of postwar Vietnamese refugees to two understudied sites of diasporic resettlement. From April to November 1975, the U.S. military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on Guam; from 1977 to 1979, Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Theorizing the figure of the archipelago, this dissertation charts connections between non-contiguous, seemingly disparate sites of analysis. Despite important differences between these two case studies, Guam and Israel-Palestine are connected via two interrelated nodes of political violence. First, both are strategic sites of U.S. military empire. Second, both are spaces of settler colonialism. Vietnamese refugees absorbed into these spaces must grapple with what this dissertation calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population.

Organized into three sections of two chapters each, Archipelago of Resettlement reconfigures understandings of both space and time. “Part I: Uncovering Sourcings” focuses on the pre-1975 period prior to Vietnamese refugee resettlement, offering an alternative genealogy of Asian American politics and a diasporic history of Third World Liberation. Chapter one re-remembers an occluded genealogy of Asian American political subjectivity. Rather than accept Guam and Israel-Palestine as relatively recent concerns for the field of Asian American studies, this chapter insists on the foundational influence of U.S. settler militarism in Guam, and American support of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, in shaping the emergence of an Asian American racial politics in the late 1960s. Chapter two theorizes and exemplifies a method of diasporic history: one that traces connections between seemingly unrelated spaces and times in order to illuminate contours of power—in this case, U.S. military empire—and articulate points of coalition between differentially-situated struggles against this structure of power—such as the contemporaneous decolonial movements in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam.

“Part II: Tracing Passages” analyzes the passage of Vietnamese refugees to Guam in 1975 and to Israel in 1977 and 1979, mapping archipelagoes of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. Drawing heavily from original archival research conducted at the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) and the Israel State Archives (ISA), this section critiques the settler colonial institutions’ moral cooptation of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, identifying how such institutions—the U.S. military on Guam and the Israeli government in Israel—used humanitarian rhetoric in order to direct attention away from ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Such humanitarian rhetoric positioned Vietnamese refugees in an antagonistic relationship to Indigenous struggles for decolonization, since the refugee figure was coopted to re-justify the benevolent power of the military and the state. Both chapter three, which focuses on Guam, and chapter four, which focuses on Israel-Palestine, end with instances of refugee refusal: that is, the refusal to conform to the script of the “good refugee” and to ventriloquize state narratives of military and governmental benevolence, in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence.

“Part III: Unsettling Resettlements” examines cultural texts depicting the refugee settler condition in Guam and Israel-Palestine. How was the late 1970s moment of archipelagic Vietnamese refugee resettlement remembered, represented, and reconfigured? How do Vietnamese refugee settlers relate to ongoing Chamorro efforts for decolonization and Palestinian struggles for liberation? Chapter five reads three quotidian texts—a Chamorro high school student’s article, a Vietnamese refugee repatriate’s memoir, and a mixed Chamorro-and-Vietnamese college student’s blog—to query the temporality of settler militarism on Guam. Unlike other forms of settler colonialism, in which the settler articulates an affective permanent attachment to the land, settler militarism on Guam is marked by the transient nature of militarized bodies that circulate between U.S. bases, eluding traditional forms of settlement. The politics of staying, of (re)settling, then, resonates very differently on Guam than in other settler colonial contexts. Chapter six grapples with the overlapping temporalities of multiple claims to the land of Israel-Palestine. Both Jewish Zionists and displaced Palestinians claim nativity to the land of historic Palestine. Thrust into this conflict, Vietnamese refugees, who were absorbed by the State of Israel in the late 1970s, were forced to navigate the conflicting temporal claims of these two populations. In order to navigate these temporal entanglements, this chapter draws from Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s assertion that “Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it.” This chapter concludes by examining the archipelagic movement of the refugee settler condition, from Israel-Palestine back to Vietnam. What happens when Vietnamese Israelis, whose lands were confiscated and redistributed by the post-1975 Communist government of Vietnam when they left as refugees, return to reclaim their lands? This chapter analyzes the film The Journey of Vaan Nguyen to argue that another way that Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians can begin to articulate an emergent vocabulary of potential parallels across the impasses of settler colonialism is by juxtaposing the uneven similarities between their two populations’ respective histories of land dispossession.

Archipelago of Resettlement concludes with a gesture towards futurities. An afterword discusses works of Vietnamese diasporic speculative fiction to query how an archipelagic Vietnamese refugee sensibility can point us towards an ethical response to the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, and how the refugee histories analyzed in this dissertation promise to haunt and shape our futures.