Description:
Refugee States explores how the figure of the refugee and the concept of refuge shape the Canadian nation-state within a transnational context.
Brief description:
Vinh Nguyen is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo.
Review Quotes:
" Refugee States makes the bold and unusual move of placing the figure of the refugee at the heart of a renewed vision of nation, multiculturalism, and humanitarianism. The collection's engaging and informative essays trace the interplay of the exceptional and the ordinary in the negotiation of identity, refuge, and community."
--Asha Varadharajan, Associate Professor of English, Queen's University"Providing a trenchant critique of Canadian 'humanitarian exceptionalism, ' this superb collection discloses the complex relations between nation-building and the modern notions of the refugee and of sites of refuge. It deftly traverses the wider debates in critical refugee studies and opens fresh avenues for research. Refugee States will be an indispensable resource for teaching and for scholars of refugee and other migrations, in Canada and beyond."
--Radhika Mongia, Associate Professor of Sociology, York University"Refugee States offers a welcome recalibration and significant reorientation of critical refugee studies as increasingly urgent interdiscipline and capacious critique. The diversity of nuanced approaches embedded in the essays that comprise this impressive volume productively lay bare the failure of state-specific humanitarianism and provocatively highlight the limitations of human rights regimes. In so doing, Refugee States offers a new way of seeing the hemispheric state and contemporaneous stakes of critical refugee studies."
--Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, professor, Department of English and Center for Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin and president, American Studies Association"'Super-refugee, ' 'bogus refugee, ' 'good refugee, ' 'bad refugee, ' 'damaged subjects in need of saving' whatever the name, as this path-breaking collection reminds us, if there were no refugees, states would have to invent them. The contributors of this volume take us on a breathtaking tour of how state power works through the figure of the refugee."
--Sherene H. Razack, Distinguished Professor and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair, Department of Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles