Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto by Eric Tang (review)

Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto troubles the dominant rescue narrative that portrays refugee resettlement in the United States as deliverance from captivity to freedom. Drawing on nine years of experience as a community organizer in the Bronx and the life history of Ra Pronh, a resilient Cambodian refugee, Tang defies teleological refugee resettlement discourses by showing that for Cambodian refugees in the Bronx hyperghetto, “refuge is never found” (5). Refugees like Pronh do not experience transitions from life under the Khmer Rouge to the refugee camps and to the Bronx hyperghetto as deliverance to freedom, but rather as reconfigured forms of captivity. Upon arrival in the Bronx in the 1980s, Cambodian refugees found themselves subject to liberal warfare, which Tang defines as “war carried out in the name of delivering human rights and freedoms” (42). Liberal warfare, waged by resettlement and welfare agents, U.N. humanitarian workers, landlords, and academics, is the lifeblood of imperial warfare. The former provides the moral justification for the latter.

Tang’s first three chapters outline the “unbroken state of captivity” (15) that characterizes Cambodian refugee life in the hyperghetto. Tang employs the term “refugee temporality” to describe refugee experiences of “resettlement” as mere reconfigurations of captivity. Refugee temporality is the knowledge that settlement will never come because it is in the state’s interest to keep refugees in a perpetual state of instability. State investment in refugee unsettlement derives from imperial and liberal warfare’s need for subjects in constant need of saving and subjects needed saving from. The refugee’s interpellation as a subject in perpetual need of saving serves as the foil to ostensibly unsalvageable blackness and to construct blackness as the thing needed saving from. Although liberal warfare is fundamentally antiblack in that it allows the “U.S. citizenry continues to understand its value—both metaphorically and literally—against the captive and violated black body” (12), it requires the refugee’s continued captivity to sustain itself. Moreover, a discourse that Tang calls “refugee exceptionalism” suggests that Black America “belongs” in the hyperghetto while refugees are “in the ghetto but never of it” (14).

Unsettled’s final three chapters turn to the unlikely forms of resistance that Ra and other refugees employ in eluding final captivity. If liberal warfare requires refugee captivity, then relentless movement is the ultimate resistance—a sense of justice that often conflicts with how community organizers working with the refugees imagined socially justice futures. Organizers persistently couched demands within the logic of state inclusion. Yet refugees insisted that this strategy put them in a false negotiation with the state. How could the very entity invested in their captivity be the source of their liberation? Refugees thus developed what Tang calls “fugitive justice,” or perpetual movement against state-sponsored enclosure. Knowing that the state will never offer repose, refugees refuse stasis, finding a justice in the “unclosed interval between past injury and awaited redemption” (159).

The nuanced distinction between “refugee exceptionalism” and the “model minority myth” in Tang’s book is an important contribution to Asian American studies as scholars seek new analytical frameworks for understanding Asian American life in relation to other racialized groups. Both narratives function in similar ways; using another racialized minority to “prove” that Black poverty is a product of personal responsibility and not structural racism. Yet refugee exceptionalism and model minoritization diverge in two important ways. First, Asian American material success threatens refugee exceptionalism, yet sustains model minority discourse. Second, model minority narratives depend on Asian American escape from the hyperghetto, while refugee exceptionalism relies on perpetual captivity. Refugee exceptionalism thus exposes forms of state enclosure that the model minority overlooks.

Furthermore, Tang’s treatment of “fugitive justice” speaks to emergent work on “refusal,” pioneered primarily by Audra Simpson (2014) and Carole McGranahan (2016). Refusal differs from resistance in that the latter emerges from a will to challenge hierarchical relations or a reconfiguration...