Yến Lê Espiritu | Refugees Know Things

“Critical Refugee Studies”

with Yến Lê Espiritu

Featuring Yến Lê Espiritu, a distinguished professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her books Body Counts: The Vietnam war and Militarized Refuge(es) and Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (co-editor) have charted an interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies, which reconceptualizes “the refugee” not as an object of rescue but as a site of social and political critiques.

In this episode, Saida Hodžić and Sabrina You (former Cornell student) talk to Dr. Espiritu about her role in organizing the critical refugee studies collective and her research that critiques militarized humanitarianism while illuminating the experiences, memories, and postmemories of refugees and their children who craft their lives in the ever-unfolding afterlife of war.

“My career has really been trying to challenge the notion of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. That profoundly wrong myth erases the violent peopling of the U.S. By saying that the immigrants come to the U.S. voluntarily, it erases the history of settler colonialism, of chattel slavery, of annexation, of conquest. It also erases the history of immigration exclusion, it acts as if the U.S. welcomes all immigrants. In fact, for most of its history and still today, the U.S. has consistently excluded potential immigrants from coming to the U.S. through immigration law. And thirdly, the nation of immigrants narrative erases the history of the U.S. military interventions around the world, and that’s where my book Body Counts is calling attention to the connection between militarism and migration.”