Transcript - "Archipelagos and Specters: Refugee Settlers and Climate Refugees"
October 20, 2022 -- CRG Forum Series
Listen to "Archipelagos and Specters: Refugee Settlers and Climate Refugees" with Neel Ahuja and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi.
LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon and welcome to today's Center for Race and Gender forum, “Archipelagos, Inspectors, Refugee Settlers and Climate Refugees: A conversation with Neel Ahuja and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi “.
Before we begin, let me say that there's live captioning available.
If youlocate the button on the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, I want to begin with the land acknowledgment.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Xučyun*, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo), the successors of the historic speaking Ohlone people the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County
This land was, and continues to be, of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Tribe, and other familiar descendants of the Verona band.
We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land, Since the institution's founding in 1868 consistent with our values of community, and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples By offering this land acknowledgment. We affirm Indigenous sovereignty, and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
My name is Leti Volpp and I’m the Director of the Center for Race and Gender, here at UC Berkeley We're thrilled that you can be with us for today's event, which is a conversation between Professors Neel Ahuja and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi about their two incredible recent books. This event is hosted by the Center for Race and Gender’s Native Immigrant Refugee Crossings Research initiative and is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration initiative, the Department of Ethnic Studies, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Asian American Studies and Native American Studies.
Thank you all so much for your support of this work so I’m gonna introduce our two speakers.
And we're gonna hear from in from them in this order. First, we'll hear from Neel Ahuja. Neel, who is Professor and the Harriet Tubman Department of Women Gender and sexuality studies at the University of Maryland College Park. His work focuses on topics of race, migration and security as they intersect scholarship and feminist science and environmental studies.
Neel is the author of “Bioinsecurities, Disease, Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species”, published by Duke University Press in 2016. As his first book, and has also written recent essays examining the medicalized articulations of race, and two arenas us. Counterterrorism, detention, and the epidemiology of Kovat. 19. Neel will be speaking about his second book, “The Incredible Planetary Specters, Race Migration and Climate Change, and the 20 first Century”, published in 2021 by UNC Press.
We will then hear from Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi. Evyn is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at UCLA. Part of her work. It engages critical refugees, studies, settler, colonial and indigenous studies, and transpacific studies.
Evyn will be speaking about her book. Amazing book “Archipelago of Resettlement: The Enemy's Refugee Settlers, and Decolonization Across Guam and Israel Palestine”, which was published open access by University of California Press in April 2022. This past summer Evyn organized a public history exhibit based on this book's research, entitled “Remembering Saigon from Vietnam to Kuwa”. She's currently co-editing an Anthology Rutlich Handbook of Refugee Narratives, with Vin Win, as well as working on a second book, project tentatively entitled Revisiting the Southern Question, South Korea South Vietnam and the US South.
Evyn hosts a podcast distorted footprints through her critical refugee studies class, and I will say I’m very proud that Evyn was as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, a recipient of the Center for Race and Gender graduate student research Grant. Thank you,
And I’m an announcing it over to Neel, and then Evyn, and then we'll hold a conversation will be time at the end for discussion with the audience. So please do post comments and questions, and the Q& A Box on the bottom of the screen the so without further ado, let me turn it over to Neel.
NEEL AHUJA: Thank you. Thank you so much. ready for that wonderful introduction to Ariana for all of the work you did to set up the event, and to Evyn for giving me this opportunity to be in conversation with you after publishing this amazing book so
I can't wait to talk about yours but I think we have to talk about mine as well.
So I’m gonna I’m gonna do that but I hope you don't mind that. I might do it in a way that foreground some things that I've been thinking about since the book has come out over the past few weeks, especially I've been thinking a lot about the floods in Pakistan, and and the fact that those floods are taking place as many people in South Asia and the diaspora are thinking about the 75th anniversary of partition. And so, although planetary Specters was published before the floods, you know part of what I wanted to do was to share a little bit of some of the arguments and ideas from the book in that context.
So I’m going to share my screen here let's see if so, that this is this is the book And when thinking about how climate change in migration relate in the current moment, I've been thinking a little bit with an essay recently published by M. Of the La khalid who has documented some of the histories behind the current floods in Pakistan.
And so I’m just showing you briefly here on the top left corner. You can see areas where homes were destroyed in Pakistan during the recent floods as well. On the bottom left, as showing some of the population concentration along those same river pathways and on the bottom.
Right, you'll see that you know the current Indian government has been putting out some political advertising that might have us think about these river systems as ones that are contested.
You can even see in the upper right corner that the tarbay let dam is one in which there's huge amounts of water kind of overflowing into the nearby communities So you know part of what I’m thinking about at the moment is how the Radcliffe line which separates India and Pakistan was drawn to divide not only peoples, but waterways, forests, mountains, and farm plans.
A diplomatic effort between India and Pakistan. In the decade following partition was devoted to the management of water along the Indus River basin and other western river systems, which culminated in a 1960 treaty. The Indis water treaty that governs irrigation, hydropower, and other uses of these rivers.
The potential for flood or drought in South Asia is regularly raised among security officials as a potential source of climate-generated conflict in contemporary journalism and security policy focusing on the risks of environmental warfare. Partition is rarely mentioned, but conceptits an unacknowledged backdrop to us and European climate war planning.
The speculative scenarios of climate war which I discussed at greater length in the book. The Radcliffe line serves as the site of speculated resource conflicts and migrations that portend widely distributed displacement and social violence. Now in the East, we see but that Bangladesh is often described in this literature as the world's most climate threatened country with those at risk of displacement from serious flooding, estimated to be even higher than the scale of the original partition migrations at some 22 million.
The West Monsoon rains have caused cataclysmic flooding in Pakistan, affecting tens of millions of people in both 2010 and 2022 and while climate security experts, frame this in terms of degradation, narratives that combine resource scarcity with the vision of destabilizing migrations, activists and affected communities who look more directly at struggles to survive in reverend communities often focus instead on the common tactics of these 3 post-colonial States in establishing large dams and other forms of development that change the flow of rivers that make coastal regions susceptible to floods and droughts, and that displace those who subsist upon along the rivers, often in a agrarian and indigenous communities.
So the difference here is stark, and in the climate security, literature. influenced by those Malthusian visions of resource war, we see anxiety over the potential for failed States. From the vantage of those who subsist along the river, or face scarcity of water in the cities. It's more common to learn that state policies land profiteering and unequal access to services and benefits have greater impacts on social procarity and environmental harm on this point.
Those who advocate for environmental protections, including those depicted here. Such as the Pakistan fisher Folk Forum, who seek to protect the Indus River in the Sin Province, invoke land reform peasant rights, and even writes for the river itself as more basic paths to ensuring the sustenance of the river ecology; while abstract visions of interstate water wars conjure rivers as a resource that can be partitioned grappling with the living ebs and flows of the river require more precise calculate precise questions.
Can a river be partitioned? If so, where should we locate the cuts that reorient its body, its migration, and in the aftermath of its hydrological change, is the border located only on maps or at the sight of a dam, the siphon point for a new irrigation stream, or the dry tributary where fish can no longer spawn.
How does the change in the flow of a river shrink, extend or transform the sense of coastal habitability for diverse groups of fissures, farmers, and other workers depended on the water, since water systems configure human and animal habitation in so many parts of the world. it shouldn't be a surprise that flows of rivers are often useful in the ways that communities mark their sense of time.
This is true not only for the cyclicity of water movements and the seasonality of food production, but also of the very notions of home that transform after major climatic or development transitions, such transitions and river systems in South Asia of course took place earlier in the nineteenth century history of colonial development along ports and deltas in Bengal, even as more recent changes, such as the one that we've witnessed in recent weeks in the form of which come about from large dams and irrigation systems also spring change in the river system. Make adjustments appear to be more sudden and massive.
The debates over whether present environmental crises are best to find apocaly such as in labels like Anthropocene capital. The scene, plantation, a scene, etc. might be recast when the effects of development on a river system, either in nineteenth-century Calcutta, or in more recent flooding events in coastal Bangladesh cause groups of people who subscribe along the waterway to migrate temporarily or permanently in search of steadier incomes.
Although we need to grapple with the long d array of ecological change and its colonial roots, these temporal frames need to be further articulated in relation to the time of social reproduction as well as to the more recent histories of neoliberal environmental thought that often contain stereotyped visions of global south overpopulation and degradation.
Why have water-related migrations which are on the rise in South Asia within intensified weather disasters? Why have they failed so far to produce the kinds of climate war described as conventional state, to state warfare in us? Security discourse. Such forms of mobility need to be considered in terms of the intimate geographies of reproductive labor that constitute the life.
Worlds of many migrant workers. When a flooding event leads a family to son, one of the children to labor in a city. This production of a diaspora, kinship isn't necessarily one that divorces that child from the reproductive labor of the household leading to mass, and some flight.
In fact, the endeavor to produce a remittance income after a failed harvest, or a loss of arable land, might tie the worker deeply to the Natal community, and the work of the household whose limited resources may be used to propel that worker to the city and commute back at intervals the problem of personal or household debt may solidify such relationships between localized, reproductive and displaced formal labor which could in turn affect how migration pathways end up being imaginable or not, whether they be more localized, like rule to urban pathways or trans-regional connections, such as those that the Bangladeshi government itself has promoted between South Asia and the Gulf States over the past half-century.
So when I talk about such scenarios in planetary specters, one of the arguments I make is that the outcomes of disaster are not so deterministic as the media icon of the climate refugee might suggest. And in the book I talk about, you know, news images like these. We have one on the bottom right that talks about climate change as the driver of the migrant caravan, which is an odd way to describe it. Given the way that activist groups were involved in organizing care of events as forms of political protest that had specific policies and governments in mind.
Because the migration experiment, experience cannot be comprehensively rendered by configuring the refugee as an individuated lip, legal subject to forced from networks of social reproduction north from global level narratives of geopolitical disaster and displacement, we can begin to inquire into the reproductive labors, knowledge and transit networks and unequal social conditions that propel the refugee figure along established paths, and which pretend many possible outcomes ranging from return home to serial displacement.
As such migration itself often requires a certain amount of capital time or other resources that are easier to satisfy for those with greater resources or social status among the affected community, the so-called climate migrant is one whose apparent choices and pathways are in many ways guided by social equality inequalities embedded in structures of racial capitalism.
So Chapter 2 of the book goes in depth into how those structures have been driven by the oil economy and kind of transnational logistics. Economy in the past 50 years. The reason that I, following a tradition of scholars and political ecology and feminist development studies, argue against much talk of climate refugees, has less to do with the inability of experts or states to arrive at a legal definition of the climate refugee, and more to do with my sense that the conventional climate refugee, discourse, and images tend to abstract environmental process from the limited paths for accumulation that migrates transit and of course, there's a whole humanitarian apparatus of representation wrapped up in this that you know, often describes the climate refugee as a kind of disabled figure crossing borders, and in need of immediate relief from a receiving state.
Speaking of the limited paths of accumulation for many migrants, the fact that climate, adaptation, schemes themselves have in some instances accelerated forms of displacement in coastal regions stands as one of the most unfortunate outcomes of the class divides that frame Climate, justice struggles, the expansion of shrimp, aquaculture as a response to sea level rise and salinization in the Bengal delta It has been one of these outcomes, where adaptation schemes underwrite attempts by landowners to grab and permanently salinize land that might otherwise be used for subsistence rice cultivation. Here are some images of shrimp aqua culture in Bangladesh, as detailed by Cassia Papraqi, the imagined human capital of agriculture workers relocated to cities Dubtails with projects that preemptively attempt to clear economically precarious people in flood prone regions.
On this point I want to quote from a 2009 Bangladeshi government, climate, action, plan that dovetails with a longer history of Bangladeshi State promotion of out-migration. It has been estimated that there is the impending threat of displacement of more than 20 million people in the event of a sea level change and the resulting increase in salinity coupled with the impact of increased cyclones and storm searches in the near future.
The settlement of these environmental refugees will pose a serious problem for the densely populated Bangladesh and migration must be considered a valid option for the country. Preparations in the meantime, will be made to convert this population into trained and useful citizens, for any country trained in useful citizens is, of course, a very loaded phrase and the preemptive configurationof flood affected peoples as migrant human capital views.
Resettlement as a solution to the shrinking horizons of livability for saturated coastal regions. The way that this is sometimes configured, including by the Ipcc is very telling, and I think that the connection to Evyns book is really interesting on this, because the Ipc configures these migrants as holders of indigenous climate adaptation knowledge without kind of attention paid to how indigenous people's in a resettlement location might be affected by this.
So the Ipcc describes migration itself as an adaptation strategy, and in the last 2 Ipcc large reports numbers 4 and 5 called for indigenous knowledge through migration to be shared for international efforts to support climate adaptation. What would it mean instead to acknowledge the reproductive labor of these frontline communities as a kind of crisis sink that disperses the current offloading of health and ecological risks generated by fossil fuel use.
There's much more that can be said about the racialization of environmental displacement. The intensely lived crisis, time of frontline communities, the histories of oil-fueled racial capitalism that configure regimes of mobility and the limitations of rights-based legal redress.
But one lesson we can take away from disasters like the ongoing one in Pakistan, is that while those effective may experience the rapid shock of crisis so often thought of in our current kind of cultural productions of disaster, they often experience the slow withering of life, worlds characteristic of an already ongoing structural disposability which has just as much to do with the outcomes that are often kind of papered over in the figure of climate refugee status. The difference between these 2 temporalities of disaster fast and slow.
It's my hope we can find some resources for challenging imperial cartographies of racial capitalism that make displacement appear as an increasingly inevitable object of securitization.
Here we might instead find some resources for thinkering migrant solidarities attended to racial capitalism's force, not only in the spectacular blowback of climate events but also, in the very structures of fossil fueled life that guide our many migrant journeys.
So that's all for wow thank you.
EVYN LÊ ESPIRITU GANDHI: Alright, thank you so much, so I’ll go ahead and jump in. so thank you so much.
I mean It's so such a pleasure. to hear more about your work, and I love how you're tying it to what's happening in Pakistan as well.
And I’m so excited to be here. so thank you Leti, for the kind introduction you know. Thank you as well, Ariana, for all the organizing and getting us to here together. It's letting mentioned you know and this is also kind of a return for me.
So I’m very grateful that the Center for Race and Gender sponsored this research when it was still in the dissertation phase. So, it feels like quite a honor to return and share the book, and more about the research.
Now that it's completed so I’m zooming in today from Los Angeles also known as Tovaangar (Los Angeles basin, So. Channel Islands) ancestral homelands of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples and I’d also just like to pay my respects to the Ohlone people of Northern California so I’m gonna go ahead and share screen and share a couple of slides.
As well to talk about the book project. Okay, so I’m honored to be speaking here as part of the Native Immigrant Refugee Crossings Research Initiative does. The book is also invested in these kinds of crossings as well. So “Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine” puts critical refugees studies in conversation with indigenous and settler colonial studies to ask a couple of main questions.
So first, what happens when refugees are resettled in settler colonial states, on indigenous lands and waters? How does the figure of the archipelago in the Vietnamese concept of nook enable us to make critical connections between different spaces of refugee resettlement US empire settler, colonial displacement and indigenous resistance, and I’ll talk more about this in the concept of note.
But one of its meanings, Of course, is water so I’m really interested by a lot of the questions and water politics. met. Neel is posing as well. so in my brief comments today.
I’d like to introduce the concept of the refugee seller condition, discuss the books, metaphors and methodologies, and then it give you a preview of some of the books main case studies. And if you're interested in learning more I’m happy to share that the book is published open access as let me mention
So Ariana will drop a link in the chat where you can download it.
For free if you'd like to read more so I’m actually gonna start by reading to you from the opening pages of the introduction of the book to begin my discussion of how the Vietnamese concept of book, and the figure of the archipelago inform my relational methodology, and I’ll explain a bit more as well what I mean by the Vietnamese by the refugee settler condition.
So here's the book, so I’m gonna read to you a little bit, and then I’ll talk and return again to my comments
So we'll talk about book first Vietnam is nook, water, country, homeland. Land is water, Water is land, a duality without division, a contrast without contradiction. Nooky, now a home, a cradle, a point of departure, one island and archipelago of diceport collectivity. According to Vietnamese mythology, Vietnam was born out of the consummation of water and land alcohol. The mountain ferry fell in love with Lack Number One, the Sea Dragon King.
Together. they produce a 100 human children. but alcohol longed for the mountains, and lack of Quang longed for the sea, and so they separated, dividing their children across the lands and waters of Vietnam. Perhaps this originary division of a mother's children prefigured feature Cleavages division of north from South Vietnam, along the seventeenth parallel in 1954 followed by 2 decades of civil war and Us military intervention, and then the division of a unified Vietnam from its post, 1975 refugee diaspora, who fled wars aftermath by air and by sea touchdown on new lands, and were washed in salt water.
Vietnamese refugees resettled around the world, forging new islands of belonging in the respective countries of asylum. Collectively. these islands make up in the archipelago of resettlement a post-war diaspora, connected by the fluid memory of a beloved homeland lost to war as the pacific ocean links with tongue and writer Appelli, how often famously termed a sea of islands.
So, too, does new look connects the archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement. The resettlement is vexed when refugees, resettle and settler Colonial States resettlement is unsettling when predicated on the systematic dispossession of indigenous peoples so this book asks: What are the political implications of refugees claiming refuge on stolen indigenous land?
Do archipelago of refugee with settlement, reinforce ongoing structures, settler colonialism?
Or can they be refracted through nook, a land water dialectic, to call forth the colonial solidarities?
So these questions, I think, challenges to think through distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and indigenous displacement Shapes by entangled histories of war, imperialism, settler colonialism, and us military violence.
They invite us to imagine new forms, of that the goal relationality. and I’ll just pause here and say that I think part of Neel's presentation, too, is to think about those overlaps between refugees who also might be indigenous, displaced peoples as well.
Okay, So I’ll return to the meeting you nook to loved one's country, the highest virtue demanded of a Vietnamese Look nook to lose one's country to be without the life source of water lamb nook to make water slash, land, to punch the thirst of a parsh heart.
So this book puts indigenous and settler colonial studies and conversation with critical refugee studies in order to theorize what I call the refugee seller condition.
So the vexed positionality of refugee subjects whose citizenship in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an indigenous population so let's get a little ahead of the book and talk a little bit more about this concept of the refugee settler. So. Refugee settlers, I argue, are not directly responsible per se for the settler. Colonial policies of the State into which they are both interpolated. So P. O. L. and then interpolated P. Ell.
However, their processes of home making, of creating an island of belonging in their new country of resettlement do take place on contested land, rendering them what Michael Rothburg has theorized as implicated subjects.
The challenge then, is to put refugee critiques of the nation, state, and conversation with indigenous critiques of settler colonialism, in order to challenge that like colonial States, monopoly over the land and the sea articulated together refugee, modalities of statelessness and indigenous epistemologies of human land water relations. we can unsettle settler colonial state, violence pointing us toward more pluralized forms of collective belonging, routed through nook to lamb, nook them to make water slash.
Land is to forge decolonial solidarities and futurities. I’m gonna return to some of my comments for this presentation. So now that we've talked a little bit about the Vietnamese concept of nook I’d like to elaborate a bit more on this figure of the Archipelago, and how it relates to the books relational methodology, so like nook and archipelago right is made up of both land and water, a duality without division, a contrast without contradiction.
So land understood as in Mishuana Goeman’s words quote a storied site of human interaction and a quote meaning, making process rather than a claimed object.
And quote it's a key focus, of indigenous sovereignty, movements. indigenous sovereignty, moreover, is distinct from nation state sovereignty, and how it's articulated and that indigenous sovereignty, according to Irene Watson, quote, embraces diversity, and focuses on inclusivity rather than exclusivity, end quote.
And then, since land is settler, colonialism quote specific, irreducible element. To quote Patrick Wall, it's arguably at the heart of indigenous people's struggles for sovereignty.
So we'll talk a little bit about water water connects fluidivity, fugitivity, movement, and connectivity the erosion of borders by the constant waves of the sea.
I really love this question that Neel post of how can we partition a river? right? Rivers do cross borders. so how can that sort of inform our thinking as well? So water is a salient medium and metaphor for diaspora and force displacement from the black Atlantic to the trans-pacific I’m Syrian to Vietnamese both refugees.
Water, however, I wanna say, is not in opposition to land, and the figure of the Archipelago refracted through Vietnamese epistemologies of nook remind us of the entanglements between land and water, indigenous and refugee that is, Indigenous peoples can be refugees of settler, colonial displacement in refugees in turn can become settlers on indigenous lands and waters.
According to Chicago scholar Johnny Bolivin, indigenous quote emphasis on the specificities of origin place and belonging, and quote is not in opposition to quote movement dispersal and diaspora and so I really appreciate how she's pushing against right these binary oppositions so this duality, I think, is also really apparent and Pacific Islander scholarship that I’m. really inspired, by which theorizes oceana as a life force connecting indigenous island nations to one another, as well as their respective diasporas.
So, according to Lany Thompson, our keypologics emphasize, quote, discontinuous connections rather than physical proximity fluid movements across poorest margins rather than do limited borders and complex spatial networks rather than oblique horizons of landscapes. In some moving islands rather than fixed geographical formations, and quote. So this idea of archiepologics also calls to mine at glory Songs, poetics of Relation. right?
So thinking about this philosophy. grounded the antelope's Archipelago quote in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other end quote: So relational archipelagics marks this books. Metaphors, methodology, and cartographies. So, thinking about the practice of tracing an archipelago of Vietnam refugee resettlement. Right.
So the at least from settlement to Guam as well as to Israel Palestine, which I’ll talk about, and how that can in turn illuminate an archipelago of us empire.
So really want to think about how the Vietnam war is linked to us. Military buildup in Guam, as well as an unwavering military and political support of the state of Israel. But we can also think about a corresponding archipelago of trans indigenous resistance, and I’m borrowing this term transcendent just from Chadwick Allen.
So thinking, for example, about connections between the Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles. and one way we can think about those connections or trace the materially.
It's tracing where the Vietnamese refugee figure ended up. So the figure of the Archipelago emerges from the specificity of these books. Sites of analysis. right? This is not just something that I’m imposing as an academic scholar upon these sites but reallly emerges imminent, more eminently.
So you want to talk a little bit more about Guam. So Guam, as many of us know, is actually part of a larger archipelago of the digits.. Chamorroland the Marianas centuries of Spanish, and then US colonization, however, have divided Guam from its 14 sister islands to the north, after the Spanish American war.
In 1898 the United States took over Guam while Germany took over the Northern Marianas following Germany's defeat in World War. One Japan ruled over the Northern Marianas until its own defeat in World War 2 and World War Ii plays a really key role in Guam's history.
So to this day, the Chamorro people remain divided over these two distinct political entities, even as they are connected by water. Right? So we have the unincorporated territory of Guam, whose residents are us citizens, but who cannot vote for US President? And then the company wealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, so to retain an archipelagic imaginary.
Therefore, is to resist what Chamorro scholar Tr and the pouti calls quote colonial cartographic violence, and quote: Moreover, since World War II one has been heavily militarized. and today the US.
Military continues to occupy one third of the island's territory manifesting and catherine loves his words, Quote the highest ratio of us military spending and military hardware and land takings from Indigenous US populations of any population of any place on earth and quote, so really want to think about how this militarized environment that affects Vietnamese refugees coming in.
So I’m gonna talk about Palestine First, though Palestine has become increasingly archipelagic, and Israeli, as Israeli. settlement and occupation disrupt the contiguity of Palestinian life. Worlds. So Palestine and Israel is not obviously or not literally an archipelago right? But I really wanna turn to this map the Archipelago of Eastern Palestine, created by the French artist artist, Julian Bousac, to think about the archipelagic nature of Palestine life worlds and their curtailment of mobility.
And I want to give a shout out to Keith Feldman, who, I think, is in the audience of what's one of my dissertation advisors who first introduced me to this map. So it was really influential in my thinking. So this map takes the 1995, also a course division of the West bank is to A. B. and C. Zones. as a pointed departure illustrating and Scholar Jennifer Lynn Kelly's words quote how settler colonial state practice can create Island formations without water and quote so now that at elaborated on the concept of nook and the figure of the Archipelago, I like to talk a little bit more about the big main case studies.
So Vietnamese refugee migration to Guam and Israel Palestine, to elaborate on what I call the refugee seller condition. So from April to November, 1975, the US military process over a 112,000 Viet refugees on the unincorporated territory of Guam. During what was called operation new life. And this was actually the first major US processing center for Vietnamese refugees. After the end of the Vietnam War.
And I really like to turn to this photograph which I found in my archival research at the Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam. Because I think it really brings to mind a lot of what critical refugee studies is trying to do, which is to push. it gets right. This figure of the destitute refugee of the refugee in need of saving.
As Neel sort of talked about and really thinking about, you know, refugee smiling right, how they actually make the most, and they make the best of a very difficult situation, and can actually create new life worlds on the camps, and beyond and I’m gonna turn now to the other case study. So from 1977 to 1979, the state of Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees.
And this is a really important case study within Israeli domestic politics, because it's the first time that Israel offered asylum and then eventual even citizenship, to non-Jewish refugees. and it's actually quite a case of exception so in more recent assignment case, cases of folks claiming asylum in Israel, Israel has been really reticent or hesitant to say yes, and offer asylum to other refugees.
So. Why was the Vietnamese case such an exception? So for Guam right, we can ask, How do Vietnamese refugees relate to the Chamorro decolonization, movement, and for Israel Palestine? The question becomes how to Vietnamese refugees who are granted. Israeli citizenship. right of a settler, colonial state relate to the Palestinian liberation struggle.
So I want to talk a little bit about method. So archipelago of resettlement is a profoundly interdisciplinary project that necessitated multiple methodologies, archival research oral histories and literary and film analysis. So I conducted a original archival research, and Guam, Israel, Palestine, and the Continental US.
To better understand how the US military in Guam and the Zionist government in Israel represented Vietnamese refugees and talked about their resettlement efforts. I find that in Guang the humanitarian rhetoric that newspapers and politicians used to describe operation, new life actually retroactively justified, set my militarism in Guam and borrowing this term set like militarism, usually at the ballet, and so by extension.
This position Vietnamese refugees and a structurally antagonistic relationship Chamorro, decolonization struggles that we're opposing and critiquing military settlement.
So this structural antagonism is really important, right? So, even disregarding Vietnamese refugees sort of individual interests, they were really turning to this kind of structures right Now they're pitting these populations against in one another.
So in Israel, Palestine, Zionist leaders, such as Prime Minister, Manakan, Vegan, drew parallels between be at least refugees and Jewish refugees, including the contemporaneous displacement. A Palestinian refugees by Israeli seller colonial policies. Archival records, however, are largely told from the perspective of those in power, and therefore I want to turn to oral histories with Vietnamese refugees and Guam in Israel Palestine better understand their experiences of the refugee seller condition.
So in the art histories that conducted for this project, I find that, given the trauma of force, displacement, refugees express strong attachments to the land and waters of their resettlement, as well as sincere gratitude, actually to the settler institutions that resettled men.
So what in the book I call refugee settler desire. So the for the most part they view indigenous decolonization movements with weariness or even suspicion, expressing concern about further displacement under the insertion of what addition to sovereignty Looks like.
So really wanna take seriously right. these reasons for why we see these structural antagonisms, and what I call the refugee settler condition. But I also just don't want to end there but want to turn to to charities and decolonial solidarities.
In order to do that, I really turn to cultural production from dice for Vietnamese, Chamorro, and Palestinian writers and artists to pro what Raymond Williams terms emergent structures a feeling so thinking about these visions of decolonial solidarity that have yet to be fully articulated of the social brown.
So I’m gonna end my presentation by just showing you a slide of some of these cultural productions that I talk about in the book.
So you can see here works by Vietnamese Dice Forks and the Israel Palestine, as well as Guam, and some of the earlier chapters of the book, also look out the Vietnamese refugee conviction within the US kind of Continental US as well so I’ll go ahead and end there, and I look forward to our company conversation.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you both so much that was amazing. we're gonna do this exercise. Now, where we're gonna hear from Neel about Evyn, and Evyn about Neel. and then we'll open it up to a broader conversation so do post things in Q&A.
NEEL AHUJA: I’m I’m so glad that we got this overview of the book from you, because it really is breathtaking in scope, and if you haven't gotten to read archipelago for settlement. Yet I’m really excited for the opportunity you're gonna have to see both the kind of methodological complexity of it, The original archival research, and then the sophistication of the analysis.
And really, though I wanted to read a passage if that's Okay, because it's beautiful and it gets at the heart of you know, some of the things that you're trying to articulate in this project, that I think are relevant, you know, both in the context. you look at and in some other ones that I've been thinking about.
So this comes from the afterward. This book insists on the importance of mapping archipelagic histories of refugee resettlement in order to envision decolonial futures. Yet history must not be uncritically memorialized. We must sit through the traces of the past to figure out which ones we cling to in order to keep adrift.
I suggest we let go of attachments to Southern colonialism, refugee, displacement, and nation-state exclusion and work instead toward an archipelago of decolonization Book, or what then wind calls oceanic spatiality, The waterscape of the boat and of the sea can help to wash away the debris.
And I found this passage both moving and resonant with a lot of the ways that critical refugee studies has this potential to ask difficult questions about the ways that refugee experiences and narratives have been hailed by different colonial states in ways that distort, and even attach us affectively towards a kind of settled colonized vision of oneself in the aftermath of migration.
And it really reminds me of the various ways that in your book the complexity of grappling with difference within the affected communities become so central to working out the politics of decolonization as it might be articulated with other groups
So you know one of the the reasons that I’m I’m so you know, in love with this book is because it is it's, not simply accepting these narratives of crisis, and it's not allowing for us to sweep away the pre-existing power structures that characterize refugee life.
And so there are a few points in the book that I wanted to just highlight. One of them. is thinking through the very terms of refugee and settler. and, you know, focusing from even the early pages of the book on how both US and Israeli settler states, actually incorporate visions of the settler as refugee as part of the national mythology, and if that's already woven into the kind of colonial fabric of displacements, then there is a kind of need exactly for the for what I quoted from the afterward for a kind of disruption of those effective attachments to the lost tongue land, and to the ways that that becomes scripted as a kind of national loss.
And I think that this translates into thinking about the refugee settler condition in ways that are extremely complex. First of all acknowledging that indigenous peoples are also on the move, and that the migrant or the refugee can, in fact, also bear indigenity.
And so what does it mean to think about the complexity of a US settler militarism that is woven on lands in which you know many, many different peoples are being displaced. And yet where so much of the energy of mobility is then being corralled into the militaristic and nationalistic policies that are being supported.
And one of the the kind of critical ways that the book gets into this complexity. there's many moments but one of them is with the chapter on operation New life which thinks about what it means when Vietnamese are resettled on Guam and that there are various forms of Chamorro, kind of Chamorro articulations of critiques. of the us military that doesn't necessarily translate into a kind of xenophobic like, don't come here.
So how can we build upon these kinds of moments to develop that archipelagic vision of decolonization? This is one of the brilliant moves that the book makes and it's not coming out of nowhere. It's coming out of these detailed histories that that you develop.
And so that waterscape of boat and sea that you're talking about in visions of a decolonizing future.
This is a kind of vision of decolonization that I do see, as opposed to the kind of armed lifeboat security discourse that we're witnessing with a lot of climate change discourse these days.
So I’m just going to end with this final point about how this connects to the the figure of the climate refugee, and I think that these are exactly the kinds of tracings of trans regional connections that both mobilize our movements, but that also forge the grounds for how we kind of have to resist and also rethink our own community narratives.
That's exactly the work that needs to be done to disrupt these overly broad narratives, like the anthropocene, or the climate refugee.
So I’m so taken with this book I’m really honored that I got a chance to reflect on it today, and I hope I just didn't talk too long, but I really appreciated getting to share on this and I have so much more to say. but I’m going to cut it off
(LAUGHS)
EVYN LÊ ESPIRITU GANDHI: Thank you so much, Neel is such a honor to be in conversation with you. So I don't have formal comments but I just wanna talk through. You know some of what inspired me by reading your book? Why, I wanted to be in conversation with you. And some of the key terms. You know that both come up in the book, but also in the presentation today, and how they're really, you know, I think, can inspire a lot of the new work.
You know part of what I think is really interesting. about this book is how you're drawing together all of these fields right, which have not necessarily been in conversation with one another. Right.
So we have all these critiques of racial capitalism that haven't necessarily been talking to critical refugee studies in this way.
And then you're also bringing in right this discourse about environmentalism. And of course, the sort of figure of the climate refugee in particular. And you know I think, in my work I’m have really focused on the sort of critique of humanitarianism that is associated with representations of the refugee.
But I like how you actually turn us to this question of the securitization rhetoric as well. Right. So thinking about the security apparatus that is sort of then mobilized with the climate refugee as an excuse. Right.
Which is to say, thinking about how you use this term like destabilize destabilizing migrations. And I really appreciate that term because we usually think about destabilized migrations, right migrants who have been destabilized from their homelands.
But how is that actually in a very in city, with insidious way? Right, then turned to be destabilizing migrations. Right. which is to say that these these migrants in these refugees who have different, you know, degrees of agency, which I think you point out right. A lot of people are so migrating from the rural to the cities. And they're responding right to these kind of like global capital flows.
Which they don't necessarily have control of and so then these sort of global North states can in their sort of high high mind I guess, sort of critique that from abroad, without sort of recognizing what are the log or colonial histories that are at play right? That actually lead to these migration patterns?
So yeah. So I really appreciate this sort of critique of the the climate security apparatus. And really thinking about. You know the causes right I think that's one sort of connection between both our projects. Right. it's not taking refugee migration at face value, but rather giving this longer historical context, which is a longer critique of colonial forces as well as sort of empire and imperial forces.
So I really appreciate. You know how you are drawing. You know as well, connecting this to the long history of the oil regimes and South and Southeast Asia. And and drawing that into together and really thinking about how climate refugee discourse. right.
Of course this seems to be a contemporary phenomenon, or at least the media would lead us to believe so. But how actually, you know these movement of these longer history?
So I really appreciate that. and the thing is the last thing that I will say is that I also really appreciate. I think the sort of geographical focus of your study.
So you know, in my work I’m much more familiar with the figure of the climate refugee in the Pacific and in Oceana And so I really appreciate how you turn this to spaces like Bangladesh And to think about these other cartographies right In which these situations are happening.
So yeah I guess I’ll go ahead and end there. But I really appreciate meeting conversation with you, and I look forward to questions from the audience as well.
LETI VOLPP: That was unbelievably generative, to hear from both of you about each other as well as about your own work. So I so appreciate it a reminder to our audience the Q&A box is open if you want to post questions.
But maybe one thing that we could I mean there's so many things that both connect these 2 books, and also ways in which these two books diverge. Right. So they're both writing in the space of critical refugee studies. right? So against the notion of the humanitarian or non-agentic subject who has acted upon but rather is a paradigmatic figure of geopolitical critique.
And what it then shows us by focusing on these figures I’m really struck by the role of water in both of your books, and at the end of Neels introduction. Neel warns of this vision of this quote permanently syncing future. And then at the end of Evyns book, Evyn talks about. Only then can we keep afloat. And then, of course, as she was talking about, the whole idea of nook and waters is so foundational.
Anyway. So I was curious if you had more things to say about land and about water and how land and water are conventionally thought about in these two contexts and ways in which your work absolutely disrupts that.
I was also wondering if you might want to take up the invitation to think more about indigenity and refugees. So this is something very explicitly addressed in Evyns book, with the refugee settler condition, and Chamorros on Guam. And how do we?
This very path, breaking theorization of the how do we think about these questions? At the same time. and then, as Neel was saying the climate refugee, who can also be this indigenous subject? Who's moving, and the kind of complexities of thinking about the displacement by refugees. And of refugees moving through space. This figure, whose mobility is, and adaptability, I think, actually, paradoxically right.
This notion, as Neel talks about of this vision of the climate, refugee is adaptable and resilient, as kind of a model as opposed to the kind of pathetic acted upon figure is really interesting.
But if we think about the vision of the indigenous or the native, the immigrant, and the refugee, what does out refugee and indigenous specifically tell us that thinking about immigrant and indigenous does not right.
So one thing I was thinking about was the frequent reference people make to the Tongva drumming circle at Los Angeles Airport. So when then, President Donald Trump announce the Muslim ban right There was you know, this very well publicized. no ban on stolen land, welcoming, drumming circle.
And this kind of very beautiful vision which was specifically around welcoming immigrants who were not refugees. But I think we're perhaps perceived as such because of the coercion that was experienced of the Trump administration.
So thinking about forced migration, voluntary migration, indigenity like, how do we think about the layering of these different kinds of movements and communities and fields of study? I mean they're all of these things at the same time anyway.
So maybe let me let me step there and see if you have anything to say in response
NEEL AHUJA: You feel free if you have any thoughts to start.
EVYN LÊ ESPIRITU GANDHI: Maybe I’ll, I’ll say a couple of words.
So. you know one thing that I think that you know I I draw from Neel's work is this idea that the climate refugee for example, you know this kind of like discourse right up the rising waters. So the kind of dominant discourse around climate refugees or climate change will usually articulate water right as a threat, and A. it's a kind of right that has no history right right so it doesn't sort of look at these longer histories of sort of historical, colonial, and imperial violence. But also, I think, really discounts concurrent understandings of water also as a life force right? And so how can we think about these two thing and and in conjunction, right as not a dual as a duality rather than a contradiction?
And you know it also reminds me as you know how nook and how water also figures, and sort of the Vietnamese in particular refugee imagination, right? So particularly for that later migrations of both refugees. Water is associated with the escape with the boat refugee exodus with sort of the a lot of the deaths and drowning that happened.
But also water is associated with the homeland, right and it is considered nook, and in the sort of next feelings that one has of having to leave a space and not not knowing whether one could return and even one would return right it's not the same homeland that one but So yeah, I mean I think that'll both of our projects are really trying to complicate and told the complexity of all these different meanings that hold right and the kind of idea of water
And yeah maybe I’ll just kind of, you know. Speak to these these overlaps, right? And these connections between refugee and an immigrant and asylum seeker, and also native indigenous.
So you know, I think one thing that critical refugee studies really tries to do is to expand the figure of the refugee to think about force, displacement, and force migration more broadly. Right. Which is to say that it really pushes against a very narrow UN or United Nations understanding of who is considered a refugee which is very legalistic, and is no project shows like climate refugees There's no legal you know definition yet. and that's part of what makes this so tenuous, and why the turn to law an international lawl can feel so tenuous.
And so you know, I think that my project is very much in conversation, and indebted to a lot of the conversations that were happening, and Asian seller colonial studies, and really thinking about Asian immigration, in particular, including labor migration. to work on the plantations of Hawai’i.
And I really wanted to think about, though the specificity of the refugee in the specificity of force displacement, which is to say also that of course, there's the continuum right there's not a clear black and white between, who is an agential migrant or immigrant, and who is a refugee?
But I think this question becomes even more vexed right when there is no sort of choice to leave once homeland right, and the ability to go back to one's homeland. Especially when it's been torn by violence or one is a political refugee. Feel so impossible, right? And so how can we actually think about then making space on indigenous lands and waters, and thinking about the ethical accountability that one can have to decolonial movements which shouldn't necessarily be internalized as a threat of oh, I’m going to be displaced again. You know.
At the same time, I think I really in this project wanted to. Yeah, try to figure out why refugees might have that feeling of the concern?
NEEL AHUJA: Yeah, that's really helpful in it. and I love this line of questions that you shared with us.
I think that one of the kind of fascinating things about water is the reversals that sometimes happen where there is planning that goes on for years about how drought is going to be the disaster.
And then suddenly the Pakistan floods come (inaudible) and sometimes these really, these these kinds of expectations and anticipations, where people are already kind of conceiving of the unlivability of life really kind of impact and influence the way that the figure of the refugee is scripted.
You know such that you know a person might even rewrite one's own experience to conform to that narrative, and that's one of the complicated things and I think the criticality of critical refugee studies is sometimes forcing us to ask hard questions about, like the refugee, as as kind of speaking subject, and what it what it means to tell the story in a certain way.
And so those narratives about I have a chapter on the Syria War and drought. Have been kind of peddled out by a lot of security experts, as like the paradigmatic examples of how climate change is going, causing warfare.
It's often associated with kind of fears of Islam, and when you dig into the stories sometimes it is a kind of scripted kind of version of the story of you know the loss of water.
It led. it led to the migration. this is showing how the whole society becomes destabilized. and you know, are there ways of reframing the question of water loss when we're having so many kinds of movements in different ways in which water is being interacted with as a material substance, as a kind of natural resource, but also as something where hydrology itself can become part of the mobilizations and the alternatives that people think about So part of what I thought about when thinking about indigenity with the book had to do with pipeline activism in the ways that indigenous peoples have been contesting.
Racial capitalism through oil, (inaudible) but also, you know thinking about the ways that people are reframing agriculture. and there are radical visions emerging for how you know, maybe maybe less water, isn't the end and what kinds of forms of habitation do we forge in the aftermath?
So one of the images that I write about in the book is of a family seated around a hearth not seated. They're standing because there's like 2 feet of water and they're still cooking, and and so what does it mean to kind of muddle through all of this.
When we sometimes might be submerged in water where we sometimes might be experiencing no water, and and there are ways of disrupting the narratives that might point to some of these submerged ways in which reproductive labors are showing decolonial futures that's my hope at least (LAUGHS) I feel like I talked too much.
(LAUGHS)
LETI VOLPP: No this is amazing, but so fascinating to hear each of you speak about this.
If we had more time I would wanna hear more about methodology, and what overlaps and diverges with what each of you did.
Whether Neel thinks that Neel's book is engaged also in a kind of archipelagic history. (inaudible)
Whether Evyn, if Evyn were it so it's it's when one question might be like, if each of you wrote the other person's book
EVYN LÊ ESPIRITU GANDHI: (LAUGHS)
LETI VOLPP: How would it be different? Right, and and what might shift right, and what so, what would come to the for and what might receive? And then what might that tell us? But we are out of time, so I will close by sharing.
We have in the Q&A, kudos, an affirmation. This is from Keith Feldman. Such incredible books, congratulations, and huge gratitude to you both for these powerful contributions.
I can only say I feel the same. These are absolutely stunning, amazing books that everybody must purchase or read for free with open source. And digest and think about. I mean, these are just absolutely foundationally changing. Books that are gonna shift the ground that that we walk on, and all kinds of assumptions we make.
So I want to thank you both so much for being here with us today. It was wonderful to hear from you. Thank you.
NEEL AHUJA: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
EVYN LÊ ESPIRITU GANDHI: Thank you, Lettie, and thank you, Neel. It was so wonderful to be in conversation.
LETI VOLPP: Bye