Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees In The New York City Hyperghetto (asian American History & Cultu)

After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty. Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life. Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery's afterlife? Contents 6 List of Figures 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Refugee in the Hyperghetto 16 1. War/Time 43 2. Housed in the Hyperghetto 67 3. Welfare Resistance 92 4. Workfare Encampments 116 5. Sweatshops of the Neoplantation 135 6. Motherhood 156 Conclusion: “Unsettled” 178 Notes 202 Bibliography 222 Index 234 Eric Tang. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.