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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...