Linh Thủy Nguyễn. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production

For the better part of the last half-century, trauma has been a ubiquitous frame through which we make sense of ourselves and others.While the idea of trauma may encourage empathy as well as exploration into personal and collective histories, it more often than not normalizes historical outcomes, pathologizes reaction to violence, and forces closure.When the framework is used for understanding the behavior of others, it often compresses their lived experiences into well-worn narratives that underwrite projects of settler colonialism, imperialism, and structural racism.Unsurprisingly, trauma has reigned in refugee studies in general and Vietnamese refugee studies in particular.Linh Thu Nguyn's Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production makes a vital intervention by prompting us to ask, "Why is the discourse of trauma accessed more readily than the frame of racism or state violence in discussions of U.S. involvement in Vietnam," which "gets lost in the personal narratives of the children of Vietnamese refugees?"(p.2).In raising this question, Nguyn makes a very compelling argument based on her reading of documents, sociological research, and refugee cultural productions to redirect how we think about the refugee family in relation to US racial and imperial projects.The necessity of Nguyn's question is laid out in the introductory chapter.The exigencies of a racist empire are occluded in stock narratives about trauma at the site of the refugee family.While the Vietnam War consistently shows up as "the source of trauma in second-generation and diasporic cultural productions," Nguyn argues, its narrativization "elides the overwhelming presence of assimilation as the source of violence and trauma" (p.4).This elision prevents us from a deeper and wider understanding of refugee family and community.Nguyn brings in the wider context of empire to situate US racist assimilation.The trauma is explained in terms of not just US intervention in the Vietnam War and the devastation in that violent imperial adventure but also the aftermath of the war.Rightly, Nguyn lays out the trauma that came as a result of the legacy of US war making, such as the destruction of economic and social infrastructures in both South