The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages by Mimi Thi Nguyen (review)

It has been over ten years since American Studies Association president Amy Kaplan called for a reexamination of U.S. imperialism in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, originally called Operation Iraqi Liberation and later renamed Operation Iraqi Freedom.¹ Asian Americanists have made innumerable contributions to the study of U.S. imperialism, in particular the colonization of Hawai’i and the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century. Mimi Thi Nguyen’s book refocuses this examination on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, theorizing the contours of this recent phase of U.S. imperialism under what she calls the sign of “liberal war” (3–4), which the United States wages in order to impose the titular “gift of freedom” upon other peoples. While she alludes to Operation Iraqi Freedom in her preface, Nguyen’s main concern is the discourse surrounding refugees of the Vietnam War (1964–75), considered the last major conflict of the Cold War for the United States and, thus, a bridge to post-9/11 new world orders. Her argument shows the entanglement of old colonial logics with neoliberalism’s fantasies of global capitalist and democratic development—what Nguyen terms “liberal empire”—to produce the refugee as the privileged recipient of its generosity. As with all gift economies, however, the gift of freedom engenders a constitutive debt that the refugee forever toils to repay, not only through economic capital but also through the symbolic labors of proper citizenship, in some cases even lending themselves as multicultural alibis for new violations of racial and national others through the war on terror.

Some of Nguyen’s most useful and impressive arguments take place in her introduction titled “The Empire of Freedom,” where she outlines the theoretical underpinnings of her project. Here, she mines the later work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, two French poststructuralists whose ideas have not figured prominently in recent Asian Americanist research. While Derrida may be caricaturized as merely a semiotic deconstructionist with principal interest to literary critics, Nguyen draws upon an eclectic selection from his writings on debt, exchange, hospitality, and historical time and places them in conversation with Foucault’s later lectures on biopolitics, thus translating these theories into terms useful for critiques of U.S. racial projects and liberal modernity. By framing the exercise of power as a “gift,” Nguyen captures the frightening contradictions of modern governmentality, where humanitarian “refuge” exists alongside technologies of mass destruction. While the racial difference of the refugee may not mark them for death, their salvation within this system produces their perpetual inequality from the normative citizen–subject, for they must constantly acknowledge and perform their indebtedness to the nation-state for the honor of being saved. In the case of Vietnamese refugees, their lack is doubled, for the violence from which the United States rescues them is also attributed to their own underdevelopment, which “causes” their susceptibility to communism and necessitates U.S. military intervention. This framework may be a fruitful way of looking at other kinds of subjects produced as recipients of American “gifts”—of civil rights, of immigration status, of economic opportunity—in which these supposed privileges are simultaneously signs of underappreciated forms of subjection to the modern state.

Nguyen also builds upon an extensive literature in transnational feminism and postcolonial studies throughout the book, including Rey Chow, Lisa Lowe, Ann Laura Stoler, Inderpal Grewal, Achille Mbembe, Lisa Marie Cacho, Sara Ahmed, and Jasbir Puar, among others, who help to make explicit the links between race and (neo)coloniality and their continuing importance to the U.S. liberal empire. Chapter 1’s meditations on what Nguyen calls the “refugee condition” makes an incisive critique of the pathologizing diagnoses of refugee trauma as a disorder of temporality—being “stuck in time” (55), as she characterizes the rhetoric of scientists working in refugee camps...