Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi /// Vietnamese “Refugee Settlers” in Guåhan and Palestine

For the release of Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (UC Press) on April 19, 2022, we are proposing this interview of hers about some aspects of her research, in particular the articulation of this concept of “refugee settlers” or the ways through which both U.S. and Israeli governments have spectacularized and instrumentalized Vietnamese refugees resettlement. We end the conversation with the geographic image of the archipelago associated with the Vietnamese notion of nước as visions for decolonial imaginaries.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar).  She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022), which will be published open-access on April 19.  Her work engages critical refugee studies, settler colonial studies, Indigenous studies, and transpacific studies.  She is currently working on two projects: The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, co-edited with Vinh Nguyen, as well as a second book project tentatively entitled Revisiting the Southern Question: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.  Dr. Gandhi hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class.