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Nguyen, Elaina Hang

University of British Columbia

This thesis draws upon autotheory and artistic productions by second-generation Vietnamese Canadians—the photovoice project Beyond the Lens and the poetry chapbook translanguaging—to consider the question of collective futurity for subsequent generations of Vietnamese Canadians amidst the longue durée of imperial warfare and refugee resettlement. This project responds to the entanglements between refugeeness and Canadian state futurity, where despite Canada’s complicity in the imperial war in Vietnam, state memory emphasizes Canada’s role as a humanitarian savior that provides refugees and their children with the opportunities for belonging as “good citizens.” I discuss these mechanisms as part of the state’s liberal, settler colonial, and racial capitalist logics of nation-building that mark subsequent generations as abled bodies available for selective rehabilitation; this population is necessary to uphold Canada’s global position as a minor empire. Within these restrictions on futurity, the discipline of critical refugee studies has demonstrated how a broad reading of refugee subjectivity can help re-think futurity, with refugee existence symbolizing fluidity and relations that exceed state citizenship. This thesis examines how second-generation Vietnamese Canadians inherit and negotiate both these legacies of futurity, as those whose subjectivity exists between these modes of belonging. Chapter One's discussion of Beyond the Lens explores various responses about dream futures in Empowered Phụ Nữ’s photovoice project to demonstrates the range of ways through which futurity is imperfectly imagined alongside and within capitalism, the nation-state, refugee lineages, and liberal multicultural community. Chapter Two considers how Winston Le’s translanguaging demonstrates the ongoing effects of war’s debilitation through language. He demonstrates how mistranslation, wordplay, and language ghosts can serve as a connection to refugee knowledges and a tool to refuse alignment with the expectations of the productive citizen. Overall, this project maps out the connection between subsequent generations of Vietnamese Canadians and refugee histories to unpack the limits and possibilities of imagining collective, decolonial futurities within and beyond the nation.

Text

2024-04-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87997

Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/