Loss and Found

Situated in the field of critical refugee studies, this article conceptualizes refugee loss not as a psychological matter but as a site of social critique that is laden with political potential. Focusing on what is lost, what remains, and what is found as refugees move between past, present, and future, the article pays particular attention to the ways that refugees push against but also at times bridge multiple borders, boundaries, and barriers. Bridging kinship and queer studies with critical refugee studies, the article introduces the term sutured kinship—horizontal connections that develop to tend to the wounds caused by imperial and military violence among incommensurable yet linked groups—and offers as an example Vietnamese refugees’ outpouring of support to Syrian refugees in the mid-2010s. This critical juxtaposition of Vietnamese and Syrian refugee experiences makes visible the global historical conditions, across space and time, that link their displacement and assesses the possibilities of kinship making among refugees from the global South who are linked by intertwined yet differing political histories and displacement experiences.