In 1943, Hannah Arendt famously stated in the essay “We Refugees” (in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, Schocken Books, 2008:265) that the world needed to confront the reality of “a new kind of human being”—the stateless person. Arendt’s comment rings powerfully true today, given how rising numbers of refugees around the world are transforming societies and testing the durability of the nation-state system. The two books reviewed here offer ways to think about the often-overlooked cultures that refugees produce. Long T. Bui’s Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory is an interdisciplinary study that spans ethnography, historiography, and archival research united by cultural critique. Timothy K. August’s The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America considers the aesthetic principles that organize refugee storytelling to assert that they are central to engaging with the vitality of refugee cultures.
In Returns of War...
University of California Press