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In a world increasingly shaped by displacement and migration, refuge is both a coveted right and an elusive promise for millions. While conventionally understood as legal protection, it also transcends judicial definitions. In Lived Refuge, Vinh Nguyen reconceptualizes refuge as an ongoing affective experience and lived relation rather than a fixed category with legitimacy derived from the state.

Focusing on Southeast Asian diasporas in the wake of the Vietnam War, Nguyen examines three affective experiences—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to reveal the actively lived dimensions of refuge. Through multifaceted analyses of literary and cultural productions, Nguyen argues that the meaning of refuge emerges from how displaced people negotiate the kinds of safety and protection that are offered to (and withheld from) them. In so doing, he lays the framework for an original and compelling understanding of contemporary refugee subjectivity.

About the Author

Vinh Nguyen is Associate Professor of English at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. He is coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives and Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada.

Reviews

"Nguyen time and again writes in unusually beautiful prose, with rich imagery and delicate intricacy more commonly found in works of art than in academic monographs. . . .This monograph requires careful and sometimes repeated readings to grasp. Nevertheless, for those who are interested in a deep and deeply insightful understanding of refugees’ lived experiences—especially of Southeast Asian refugees as conveyed in their writings and other creative expressions—this book will be well worth the investment of time and contemplation."
— International Migration Review

"Lived Refuge allows us to see refugees in a new way. Eschewing the legal or moral representations of what it means to be a 'refugee,' this book explores the affective experiences of refuge. Refugees, we learn, are always working with refuge, and Vinh Nguyen’s engagement with the experiments, negotiations, and refusals of refuge provides a unique window into understanding the multiplicity of ways in which refugee subjectivity is enacted today."—Peter Nyers, McMaster University

"This is a book of and for our times, when roughly one percent of the world’s population is forcibly displaced. Vinh Nguyen gives us a conceptual framework to expose the juridical-political limits of the term 'refugee' by making a compelling case for considering 'refuge' as a defining feature of the human condition in modernity. With uncommon facility, Nguyen articulates the emotive power of forced displacements through stories and the very act of storytelling that registers refuge as a lived experience. In doing so, he invites readers to join in a collective meditation on ways in which conditions of flight and refuge become the very sources of fortitude. Written in haunting, lyrical prose with Walter Benjamin’s urgency and Raymond Williams’ political deft and precision, Nguyen’s illuminating and generative study marks a milestone, a major turning point in migration studies at large."—B. Venkat Mani, Professor of German and World Literatures and Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity Senior Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin—Madison and author of Cosmopolitical Claims and Recoding World Literature

“Nguyen offers a masterful and unrelenting rebuttal to state-sanctioned narratives of deserving, grateful, and resilient refugees. He gives us refugees as they truly are, and not as who we desire them to be. After reading Lived Refuge, you’ll come away realizing that we need refugees more than they need us.”—Eric Tang, author of Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto

Awards

Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies 2024, American Studies Association