In Archipelago of Resettlement, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi places Indigenous and settler colonial studies in conversation with critical refugee studies to explore the “vexed” positionality of what she terms the refugee settler condition: the experience of “non-Indigenous refugees who, due to resettlement following forced displacement, became settlers in settler colonial states” (5). As Gandhi argues, the humanitarian resettlement of refugees offers settler colonial states an opportunity to evade critiques of colonial violence by performing acts of multicultural inclusion. Hence, while refugee settlers are not directly responsible for the policies of the settler colonial states into which they are interpolated, their practices of creating home and belonging on stolen land implicate them in ongoing processes of Indigenous dispossession. How might grappling with the condition of the refugee settler help to expose settler colonial violence, while offering possibilities for envisioning decolonial futures?
Analyzing the subjectivity and experience of Vietnamese refugee...
University of California Press