Since the start of the twenty-first century, a remarkable coalition of Asian and Southeast Asian American community organizations, legal advocates, scholars, and allies have formed to fight the United States’ deportations of primarily Cambodian noncitizens.1 This movement shows no signs of letting up as it continues to link across US cities with significant Cambodian and Southeast Asian American presence to wage a national campaign to stop deportations. Hashtags such as #KeepFamiliesTogether, #Right2Stay, and #ThisLandIsOurHome have flooded the news feeds of social media platforms as organizers push harder to ingrain in the American public consciousness that these Southeast Asian refugees and lawful permanent residents, despite failing to obtain US citizenship (because of whatever reason), are American. Insisting that these individuals are no longer felons, criminals, or gang members but instead beloved family and community members, organizers and advocates argue that the removals are unjust because these individuals “have already served...
Toward a Trans* Refugee Critique: Notes on the Southeast Asian American Antideportation Movement
Jolie Chea is assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their publications include “Refugee Acts: Articulating Silence through Critical Remembering and Re-Membering” in Amerasia Journal (2009) and “Epiphytic Lives: Cambodian American Nonmemory and the Value of Silence,” in Social Text (2023). Their monograph in progress, tentatively titled This Is War: Cambodian American Exceptionalism and the Settler Colonial Logic of Incorporation, traces the twentieth-century emergence of the Cambodian refugee figure to a deeper and more expansive history of global racialized warfare and imperialist state violence and analyzes how Cambodian refugees have been incorporated into the American body politic. They have spent over two decades working alongside various immigrant, women, and queer and trans youth of color communities, and one decade organizing with prison abolition movements in Los Angeles, where they combine social justice activism and scholarship.
Jolie Chea; Toward a Trans* Refugee Critique: Notes on the Southeast Asian American Antideportation Movement. TSQ 1 February 2024; 11 (1): 97–110. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-11131715
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