Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022, Association for Asian American StudiesAfter the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time?
From Guam to Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong, In Camps is the first major work on Vietnamese refugee policy to pay close attention to host territories and to explore Vietnamese activism in the camps and the diaspora. This book explains how Vietnamese were transformed from de facto refugees to individual asylum seekers to repatriates. Ambitiously covering people on the ground—local governments, teachers, and corrections officers—as well as powerful players such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, Jana Lipman shows that the local politics of first asylum sites often drove international refugee policy. Unsettling most accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US, In Camps instead emphasizes the contingencies inherent in refugee policy and experiences.
Jana K. Lipman is Associate Professor of History at Tulane University. She is author of Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution and the cotranslator of Ship of Fate: Memoir of a Vietnamese Repatriate.
"By foregrounding Vietnamese refugees in Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Guam, Lipman’s careful multisited history, based on a transnational array of archives, will set the standard in English-language scholarship addressing a severe imbalance. This is at once a local, global, and transnational study of the dynamics around the vexed and shifting nature of refugee migrations."—Madeline Hsu, author The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
"This work belongs in the literature of critical refugee studies currently reinvigorating our conversations as more and more people need asylum from the violence endemic to the deadly intersection between neoliberal globalization and sovereign state power (imperial or otherwise). Following Vietnamese refugees from an older war, what sets this book apart is its insistent immersion in the contingent possibilities of what refugees do ‘in camps’ at the very site of refugee containment."—Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, author of The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam
"In this rigorously researched and crisply written book, Jana K. Lipman grapples with some of the most vexing questions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Camps elucidates how actors in specific local contexts—particularly in the camps and countries of Southeast Asia that held Vietnamese people forced from home following the US-Vietnam War—deployed, interpreted, and challenged global forces of human rights regimes, enduring legacies of colonialism, and war’s afterlife in the shifting geopolitical conditions of the Cold War and its end. It tells a crucial history we must remember in this era marked by the unprecedented numbers of migrants forced to move across ever more securitized borders."—A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century
328 pp.6 x 9Illus: 15 b/w illustrations, 4 maps
9780520343658$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Jun 2020