The Colonial Choreographies of Refugee Resettlement in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge

Through analysis of Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, this article traces how Vietnamese refugee “resettlement” can both undergird U.S. settler imperatives and critically index its operations and instabilities. Engaging the Vietnamese refugee as a theoretical figure of critique who distills the convergences of empire, racialization, and settlement, I trace the critical knowledge emergent in centralizing the intimate, quotidian, everyday aspects of Vietnamese resettlement in the United States. I argue that the generational conflict in Monkey Bridge dramatizes Việt Kiều (overseas Vietnamese) placemaking as self-regulatory and self-disciplinary choreographies of settlement that are performed along historical and quotidian scales of time. Highlighting the refusals and tensions embodied in a Việt Kiều mother’s and daughter’s choreography of settler placemaking, the narrative reveals the processual constitution of settlement, one whose seeming overdetermination is nevertheless lined by the continual ruptures immanent in the imperial and liberal regimes that structure the U.S. war in Vietnam and its aftermaths.