Un-American: Refugees and the Vietnam War

Abstract

Viet thanh nguyen always insists that he is a refugee, not an immigrant, and that his novel the sympathizer is a war novel rather than an immigrant story (“Viet Thanh Nguyen”). In an era when the refugee has become the epicenter of debates about extreme nationalism and closed borders, the distinction between refugee and immigrant demands further parsing. Nguyen states the difference clearly when he contrasts the refugee, rendered stateless and vulnerable by persecution or catastrophe, to the immigrant, whose mobility reaffirms existing narratives of bounded territories. “Immigrant studies,” he writes, “affirms the nation-states the immigrant comes from and settles into; refugee studies brings into question the viability of the nation- state” (“Refugee Memories” 930).