"The Refugee, The Deportee, and The Student "
Featuring Keva X. Bui and Mimi Thi Nguyen, moderated by Natalia Duong
Thursday January 22 4pm
Hart Hall 3201
In the United States, the axiom freedom isn't free functions as the operative logic of state violence — and some must pay its price. On the one hand, war as murderous intent, and as violent event, is external to the self-image of "America" as an agent of perpetual peace. On the other, war as the promise of continuity is vital to life’s prolongation into the future, which is to say, society must be defended. In this schema, others wage wars, and America must finish them to secure freedom, finally. This conversation between Keva X. Bui and Mimi Thi Nguyen considers three figures called upon to pay the price for that freedom — the refugee, the deportee, and the student-- as central to the multiple crises that constitute the art of racial governmentality under the aegis of U.S. empire. From the violent suppression of dissent to the unlikely subjects caught in webs of complicity with war’s everyday maintenance, this conversation reflects on how the burden of empire’s freedom unfolds in an ever-increasing militarized world.
Speaker bios:
Keva X. Bui is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies at Northwestern University. They are a scholar of everyday war and empire, examining how we live and experience war at multiple scales of being. Their first book-in-progress, Disarming Empire: Race and Anti-War Critique in US Cold War Weapons Culture, is a critical race and feminist science and technology studies account of US Cold War weapons development, illustrating how weapons of mass destruction are co-constitutive of racial and militarized logics central to US empire in the post-WWII era. Their writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Journal of Asian American Studies, Frontiers, Amerasia, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and The Sage Encyclopedia for Refugee Studies.
Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war. Her second book is called The Promise of Beauty, which considers beauty as a fruitful concept through which we engage narratives of crisis. She is also co-editor with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, and Yutian Wong for Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke University Press, 2024); co-editor with Mariam Lam and Fiona I.B. Ngo of a special issue of positions: asia critique on Southeast Asian American Studies (20:3, Winter 2012); and co-editor with Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007). She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum, and her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University.
