Introduction: Something Personal: Archives and Methods for Critical Refugee Studies in Canada Thy Phu (bio) and Vinh Nguyen (bio) Thy: When we were growing up, my parents would drive my brother and I from Toronto to Niagara across the Rainbow Bridge to the malls in Buffalo, NY, a trip that I now think of as a summertime rite of passage. It seems ironic, given how mundane the activity was, but to my mind then, nothing made us, a refugee family, more Canadian than our ability to transit freely across the border. Choosing to move as we wished, taking for granted the safety of staying put, was the fulfilment of my parents’ dreams for us, when they boarded those boats that one day, with only what they could carry and nothing more, not even the documents that disclose who we are, birth certificates, identity cards, the official records of life and its passages. This is the story that we bring with us, a passage late in the night, the waiting after my parents, who took separate boats, wondered whether we would ever reunite as a family, the joy when we did, and then another journey, yet more passages. We brought with us our hopes, our memories, no less and little more than this. For stuff, even if accumulated over a lifetime, just delays. Stuff once held dear holds back when you’re on the run. But one can’t see or measure hope and fear, except maybe through that ephemeral repository that Ann Cvetkovich, in her work on queer intimacies, calls “an archive of feelings.” This might be why a bureaucratic regime that quantifies, [End Page 1] documents, and archives provides the most recognizable measure of refugee passages, a term that Mimi Thi Nguyen invokes to denote, as she puts it, “the uncanny story of … [the refugee’s] movement from subjection to subjectivity” (25). vinh: I never intended to study English literature. I didn’t think there was a place in it for me. When I entered university, I declared Business as my major, following the advice of my refugee mother, who wanted her children to have economic stability. When I read Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water in my first year, I switched to English and told my mother that I would go on to law school (I never did, of course). Literature, especially by women and writers of colour gave me the space to think about my own displacement in the world, even if I wasn’t fully aware of this at the time. It wasn’t until my final undergraduate year when I took a course on “The Vietnam War in Film and Literature,” that I began to think about my own experiences, however tangential, as being representable or worthy of other’s interest. Although we didn’t watch or read anything by Vietnamese people in that class, I came to realize that something was at stake for me. There was something personal there, and I had something important to offer. All through graduate school, I alternately resisted and embraced the personal, the autobiographical, the attachment to my subject matter—Vietnamese refugees. Some people thought the personal was easy, not rigorous, not real research, and I believed them for some time. And yet I could never escape it. No matter how I wrote or thought, I was writing and thinking from a place that was deeply personal, even if I didn’t make that direct or explicit. There’s still a part of me that recoils from the ethnographic reveal, especially when I’m expected to “tell” others of my refugee past, through trauma, through suffering, through success and gratitude. But I also know that everything is personal, even or especially when the personal is denied. The personal, for me, structures an approach to seeing and understanding the world. It is there. It is always there. we begin with the personal to position ourselves as academic researchers, as well as to highlight the generative potential of the personal as an analytic in the field of critical refugee studies. This field has importantly brought our attention to the subjectivities and lifeworlds of refugees and not just to...