Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine

Refugees not only come with their personal experience of war and exile when they resettle, they also reflect on what their displacement represents to the history of their home country and what it means where they arrive. When they learn about their host country, they sometimes realize that their resettlement reinforces the colonization of others. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, assistant professor of Asian American studies, examines this predicament for Vietnamese refugees who, in 1975, resettled in Guam, an unincorporated US territory, and in Israel, where states have respectively caused the displacement of Chamorros and Palestinians. The book analyzes the “refugee-settler condition” through several questions—namely: “What are the political implications of refugees claiming refuge on stolen land? Do archipelago of refugee resettlement reinforce ongoing structures of settler colonialism? Or can they be refracted through nước—a land/water dialectic—to call forth decolonial solidarities?” (2).Archipelago of Resettlement is organized around three parts. The first dives into a history of an American empire reaching across Guam, Israel, and Vietnam and its underlying ideology as a frontier society. The next part is an analysis of the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in Guam and Israel. The last part discusses the writings and other artistic production of refugees and their children, reflecting on losing their homeland and on land disputes in their country of resettlement.While Espiritu Gandhi uses written and oral sources collected in Guam or Israel-Palestine, this book is not an anthropological study, nor a historical one. The analysis truly shines in chapter 2 and part 3, when it studies how poems, memoirs, novels, and documentary movies put “refugee critiques of the nation-state in conversation with Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism in order to challenge settler colonial states’ monopoly over the land and the sea” (5). Through this literary analysis, the book argues that refugee settlers both reinforce settler justifications to occupy land (3) and yet question state claims on disputed lands, by reflecting on the commonalities between their condition as refugees and those who have been displaced by the state where they resettled.Archipelago of Resettlement makes a major contribution by shedding light on the politics of resettlement in Guam and Israel-Palestine, shifting from the usual focus on the diaspora in the United States or France. Moreover, the nuanced discussion of artistic creations makes a critical analysis of the power relations arising in population movements at different levels. Individuals reflect on their family's journey, the history of their homeland, and their future in their resettlement country, as well as their role in a wider, informal, American empire. By using these two lesser-known case studies, the book reveals how refugees reflect on other synchronic and diachronic experiences of displacement. For that reason alone, the book deserves to be read by anyone interested in refugee studies or the Vietnamese diaspora.However, this recommendation comes with three important reservations. First, the author relies on the concept of nước, which means both “water” and “country” in Vietnamese, the word for “water” in Chamorro (hånom) and “sea” in Arabic (al-bahr) to claim that there is a “Vietnamese epistemology” (11) or “Indigenous epistemologies of human-land-water” (5). Some artists have found the double meaning of nước interesting, and a few scholars have suggested that water has been a leitmotif in literary production or a constant concern in Vietnam's history.1 But there is no consensus among scholars that the Vietnamese have a unique way of knowing which aspect relates their country to the water. Second, the use of the archipelago as a theoretical concept varies throughout the book. It describes a sense of belonging, an imperial system (6), a vantage point from the periphery (11), or a method of drawing relations between distant and unrelated parts (16, 21). Facing this wide range of use, it is hard to see what an archipelago is supposed to mean. Last, the book overreaches when it argues that the “long standing US influence in Guam and Israel-Palestine prefigured the passage of Vietnamese refugees to these very sites” (10, 22, 53). It declares that US intervention in Vietnam should be seen as “not only a Cold War phenomenon but as part of a longer genealogy of American westward expansion across the Pacific Islands (Guam), and into Asia—both Southeast Asia (Vietnam) and West Asia (Palestine)” (52), a “settler imperial war” (54) where its military effort resembled the work of cowboy pioneers in “Indian country” (54). This claim confuses the rhetoric with the actual reasons for intervention and suggests a one-dimensional understanding of an American empire, which handles settler colonies, military bases, security zones, and strategic allies in different ways. Notwithstanding these reservations, Archipelago of Resettlement is an important book and offers a unique perspective on the politics of refugee protection at the individual, national, and international level.

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