Displacing Kinship The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production

"In Displacing Kinship, Linh Th y Nguy n makes a crucial contribution to reframing the narrativization of familial or intergenerational trauma in second-generation storytelling and cultural politics. Against the capture of history, so often depicted as a pathological stillness or unbearable void between parent and child, Nguy n argues that narrowing the etiology of refugee trauma to war and flight eclipses other forms of violence-white supremacy and racial capitalism, among others-that are just as present as rupture or ruin. A deeply satisfying work of aesthetic study, Displacing Kinship renders more complexly the presence of trauma in our accounts of the afterlives of refugees."- Mimi Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages and The Promise of Beauty "A long history of racial exclusion made the family romance an impossible ideal for most Asian immigrants. In the brilliant Displacing Kinship, Linh Th y Nguy n reconsiders this history in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In order to redeem the traumatic violence of mass death and destruction it had enacted, the United States began fetishizing family reunification for Vietnamese refugees, giving rise to a new affective and material practice for racial subjection precisely as assimilation and national belonging."- David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans "By examining creative works, Nguye n reframes second generation Vietnamese American intergenerational trauma in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.... Nguy n's important book reshapes traditional narratives about how war, communism, and racism have impacted Vietnamese American families across generations.... Summing Up: Highly recommended." - Choice
"Building on and breaking with received wisdom, the book, which analyses a wide array of cultural forms, lays fruitful groundwork for exploring.... Amid the flourishing of second-generation Vietnamese American art, Displacing Kinship is a timely and relevant scholarly work."- Diacritics "What stands out is the author's strong and authoritative voice, which permeates every paragraph.... [A] must-read for students of diaspora studies who are interested in postmemory, identity, and belonging in a globalized world."- Ethnic and Racial Studies