“Refugee Patriots, Refugee Punks”
with Mimi Thi Nguyen
https://www.mimithinguyen.com/
Featuring a conversation with Miimi Thi Nguyen, an associate professor and chair of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A zine maker, columnist, blogger, punk. Author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages which illuminates how imperial politics produces refuge patriots. Focusing on Vietnamese refugees to North America who end up participating in the war on terror.
In this episode, we talk to Dr. Nguyen about her research on how refugees reckon with the forces that demand their participation in military imperialism and her trajectory as a refugee/activist/punk/scholar.
“I understand myself as a refugee and a punk. For me, they’re deeply fused together.”“Punk was my first radical education in thinking about empire. In thinking historically and critically about the war that made me a refugee too, to understand deeply that state violence and imperial war and indigenous dispossession were all entwined and were a part of history that was unfolding in front of me.”
“I felt like I was being told that there are certain things I was supposed to want, that certain things held out a promise of a good life. And I didn’t want them.”