Dignity in Exile: Examining Refugee Artifacts to Confront Narratives of Hypervisibility and Invisibility by the United States

In her chapter of Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies: History, Community, and Memory (2023), Thuy Vo Dang asserts that the history of many Vietnamese refugees has been “willfully deleted,” leaving them to be cast as the “losers” or “victims” in narratives perpetuated by the United States (p. 275).

In our class, we have examined how the United States boasts its refugee humanitarianism while simultaneously growing increasingly nativist. We've also examined how this contradiction is not historically limited to the United States; both ancient Rome and Athens touted themselves as havens for refugees and exiles, but enacted laws that restricted their autonomy upon resettlement.

In this exhibit, we aim to challenge dominant refugee narratives imposed by the United States, which both hypervisibilize and invisibilize the complexity of the Vietnamese American diaspora. We explore items that tell stories of resilience, of repurposing, and of anchoring oneself in the past as time moves forward. At the same time, we draw on ancient Greco-Roman artifacts to illustrate the historical reinforcement of refugee tokenization and nativism of the city/nation-state.