On the Center for Refugee Poetics

Abstract

103 Interface Lawrence-­ Minh Bùi Davis, Cathy J. Schlund-­ Vials, Ocean Vuong, Lan Duong, Monica Sok, and Catzie Vilayphonh On the Center for Refugee Poetics When, in a looping 2017 conversation about arts work and writing, poet and novelist Ocean Vuong mentioned a dream to one day found a center devoted to refugee poetics, the first of its kind, as far as we knew, anywhere in the world, I thought of my own Center at the Smithsonian. I work as a curator for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), for which a brick-­ and-­ mortar museum on the National Mall of downtown Washington, D.C., has long been the dream. APAC currently exists as a programming unit with no permanent collection or exhibition space. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), opened in September 2016, is the model. NMAAHC took decades, congressional legislation, National Park Service land approvals, and more than $500 million. For APAC, the decades are in front of us, the legislation and approvals still to come, the money mostly still to be raised. The Center for Refugee Poetics (CfRP), too, as Ocean and I talked, was an impossibly long way off—­no devoted physical space, no funding, no clear model—­ and Ocean, a newly hired assistant professor, had no mandate from his home institution, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. CfRP seemed destined to be a dream deferred. Deferral is, of course, central to the refugee condition, with refugees spending months, years, and sometimes decades in makeshift camps and temporary domiciles. Even with resettlement, refugees occupy a liminal space; as Hannah Arendt avers in her 1943 essay “We Refugees,” such displaced subjects are tasked with “mastering an uncertain future.” But as Ocean and I mulled over the idea of the Center, we asked ourselves, why wait? Even with a physical museum far off on the horizon, APAC goes on, 104 Interface and not just toward a future museum. Since 2013, APAC has been guided by this philosophy: the soul of a twenty-­ first-­ century museum lies not in its walls but in what happens inside those walls, in the experiential friction between guests and hosts, history and future. We are a migratory museum, a “museum without walls,” creating mobile museum experiences across the country and beyond, co-­creating not only with but in the communities we were founded to serve. We’ve produced pop-­ up museums in Washington, D.C. (2016), New York City (2016), and Honolulu (2017), with another to come in Aotearoa (fall 2019), plus smaller pop-­ ups all over the United States. We’ve also embraced a digital existence, launching numerous digital exhibitions, crowdsourcing campaigns, web publication series, and web-­ based film shorts. So what if we were to apply the same philosophies to CfRP? What if the Center’s crucial, constituent elements were not a building, not a parcel of institutional infrastructure, not a tangle of institutional policy, not a coil of university (or even foundation or private) funding streams? What if they were this very conversation, spooled outward? It was out of absence and scarcity that the CfRP was born as a necessarily “displaced” hub. Displacement is a defining anthem of our times, refugee communities a chorus across the world. Ocean and I are two members of refugee communities, refugee families; for each of us, poetry makes those dimensions of existence bearable, and sensical. CfRP could be our process on a larger scale, a collective exploration of how literature, and literary production and reception, can engage the global refugee condition expansively, including especially the forces that perpetually reproduce it. In the months to come, our conversation would grow to include the Asian Americanist and critical refugee studies scholar Cathy J. Schlund-­ Vials; the poet, artist, and organizer Catzie Vilayphonh; and the scholar, poet, and cofounder of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective Lan Duong. Phone calls would shift to text and Facebook messages and, later, a constellation of Google Docs—­ a set of overlapping exchanges hashing out what activities, what goals, what principles would comprise CfRP. The Center existed first, and has existed most enduringly, in this digital, discursive form. From inception, it drew heavily from critical refugee...