Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada

by Vinh Nguyen (Editor), Thy Phu (Editor)

Exploring "refuge" and "refugee" as concepts that shape Canadian nation-building both within and beyond national borders, Refugee States takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach to describing how refugees articulate their relation to and defiance of official discourses. Through close examinations of refugee movements, contexts, and subjectivities, this collection reveals how Canada has relied upon the rejection and inclusion of refugees as a crucial means of statecraft.

Bringing together renowned and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines, Nguyen and Phu illuminate the historical, political, and cultural conditions that produce refugees as well as the narrative of humanitarian benevolence that persists nationally and internationally. Highlighting landmark cases, the editors and contributors together develop critical refugee studies as a framework for understanding, nuancing, and critiquing the production of Canadian humanitarian exceptionalism - the international image and discourse of Canada as a liberal, tolerant, and welcoming haven for people fleeing oppression, persecution, and unfreedom. In doing so, Refugee States offers alternative modes of understanding past and present refugee passages to and within Canada, and brings to light the many ways in which refugee subjects navigate displacement, migration, and resettlement.

Genres: Nonfiction

248 pages, Hardcover

Published July 12, 2021

About the author

VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator. His writing appears in Brick, LitHub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Ricepaper, The Criterion Collection, and MUBI Notebook. He is a non-fiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is also a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books.

Vinh is the author and co-editor of three academic books: Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada, The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. He is a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee + Migration Studies Network Canada and co-edits passages, a book series for Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

He served as a cultural consultant for the hit CBC comedy Run the Burbs and as a historical consultant on the “Vietnamese Boat People, 1979-1981” Heritage Minute. His writing has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and has received the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Non-fiction for emerging LGBTQ writers. In 2024, he was a writer-in-residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House. Vinh was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and lives in Toronto, Canada.