Profile:

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is a scholar, writer, and filmmaker whose work engages critical refugee studies, settler colonial studies, and transpacific studies. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her book manuscript, tentatively entitled “Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine,” examines the Vietnamese refugee diaspora in Guam and Israel-Palestine as a means to trace two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire — how the Vietnam War is linked to US military build-up in Guam and unwavering support of Israel; and second, corresponding archipelagos of resistance — how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected via the Vietnamese refugee figure. This project examines what she calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of refugee subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Her second book-length project, “Revisiting the Southern Question: South Korea, South Vietnam, and the American South,” maps transnational intimacies and strange affinities between these three spaces marked by US militarism, civil war, and what Gramsci referred to as a “southern politics.” It asks: How were South Korea, South Vietnam, and the American South connected during the Cold War period? What are the political, cultural, and affective afterlives of these historical encounters?

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