Bad Refugees: Manufacturing Statelessness at the Margins of Global Northern Citizenship

Abstract

Written in conversation with critical refugee scholars who have theorized about the politics of cultural memory as it concerns formal state and community-based negotiations over how to remember the Vietnam War, this dissertation begins from this ongoing conversation to examine dismemberment as a cultural process that has significant material implications—how, in other words, historic negotiations over idealized and discarded refugeehoods produced moral distinctions that became durably materialized, categorically hardened, and bureaucratically useful across time and space to continue to authorize the state’s investment in its settler structures of living and dying. Using a frame of memberment/dismemberment, it focuses specifically on the emergence of the disposable “Vietnamese gang member” and the “Saigonese prostitute” in the case of Orange County as key Bad Refugee figures in this process of discursive negotiation that distinguished between acceptable and unacceptable refugee subjects in the historical period following the Fall of Saigon through the end of the Reagan presidency. Centering on the period during which the Keynesian welfare state became hollowed out to make way for neoliberal reforms that converged with the state’s turn to prison building to solve its legitimacy crisis following the pivotal decade, I analyze important critical junctures within county history concerning refugee arrivals that linked local contestations over taxation, permitting and zoning, and neighborhood defense to the broader racial class struggle that took place in California and later throughout the nation regarding the declining legitimacy of the Liberal Keynesianism. In centering the subjectification of disposed bad refugees within the political economic order that worked to create the conditions of their surplus, I lastly explore how focusing on the violence of instrumental rationality within the settler capitalist state therefore demonstrates how the state has slowly colonized the human lifeworld. Treating their dehumanization by the state with a critical seriousness, the analysis reveals how failure to become rationalized subjects resulted in the production of bad refugee disposability over time. Beyond detailing these vital contestations over how the war came to be negotiated in cultural memory through the formation of “bad refugees,” however, the broad arc of the argument additionally traces these adjudications within the “moral-rational” genealogy of racial capitalism to situate how contested refugeehoods emerged within the nation state relative to transformations in its political economic structure. Couched in a critical analysis of American mythology that illustrates how the suburbs were authorized by the “American Dream” and “American Manifest Destiny,” I broadly forward that suburbanization, as the “spatial fix” to the state’s overaccumulation crisis during the Great Depression that underwrote the expansion of US global influence after WWII, must therefore be understood as a form of ongoing territorialization that continued the process of settler colonization that began centuries before with Spanish contact. Ultimately engaging with Lefebvre’s framework of the “Right to the City” by including the racial capitalist character of the suburbs in its analysis, I argue for a revised definition of war that sees it as an ongoing form of territorialization and state violence that has continued through suburbanization into the present, where political strategies must correspondingly understand how the continuous history of the suburb as a spatial form reveals the ongoing settler state’s investment in claiming and privatizing the land to authorize itself to act. As the US frontier slowly pushed westward to manufacture an emptied landscape, the landscape itself became a domesticated warscape in which mythologies surrounding the home as a moral domain worked to both mask the conditions of settler expropriation and continually authorize particular family forms compatible with state interests. Conceptualizing the domesticated warscape as such, I close by echoing Lisa Marie Cacho’s theorization about the inevitability of criminalized devaluation given that some groups (in this case “Bad Refugee” “gang members” and “prostitutes”), based on the very ontological premise of their emergence, can never represent themselves as moral and deserving as the foundation for law. Insisting on building a political vision and abolitionist solidarities that consequently refuse their dehumanization thus allows for a de-hierarchization of the racial capitalist imperative to categorize human bodies and subjugate them for profit—thereby critically questioning the legal-bureaucratic authority of the contemporary settler state to organize our social relations.