Book News: Embracing the refugee

The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America

BY TIMOTHY K. AUGUST

Temple University Press, 2020

ISBN Paper: 978-1-4399-1531-8

http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009352

The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position. He explains how these artists, theorists, critics, and culture-makers reconstruct their place in the American imagination by identifying and critiquing the underlying structures of power that create refugees in the contemporary world.

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August looks at the outside forces that shape refugee representation and how these expressions are received. He considers the visual legacy of the Southeast Asian refugee experience by analyzing music videos, graphic novels, and refugee artwork. August also examines the power of refugee literature, showing how and why Southeast Asian American writers look to the refugee position to disentangle their complicated aesthetic legacy.

Arguing that “aesthetics” should be central to the conceptualization of critical refugee studies, August shows how representational structures can galvanize or marginalize refugees, depending on how refugee aesthetics are used and circulated.

"August presents a compelling and multifaceted analysis of Southeast Asian refugee artistic expression....The Refugee Aesthetic is critical, interdisciplinary, and brings needed humanity to the scholarship of migration.... (August) lays a detailed foundation for envisioning and re-envisioning what it means to be a refugee and exploring what that truer and more complex meaning tells America about itself."

—Ethnic and Racial Studies

“In the space between dominant American rhetorics of condescension or benevolence and emergent voices of authors who turn the release of information into artful acts of negotiation, Timothy August locates what he argues as the politics of the refugee aesthetic. Written with sensitivity to bring attention to subjective nuances of pain, belonging, reflexivity, and hope in numerous Southeast Asian American narratives and artworks, this book is a compelling testament to a stigmatized population’s admirably creative uses of discursive forms.”

—Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

“This erudite yet admirably lucid book brings to bear on refugee writing a new and productive set of theoretical frameworks that particularly emphasizes aesthetics and the visual. It offers fresh, compelling readings of works from Thi Bui’s graphic Narrative, The Best We Could Do, to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer. As a result, The Refugee Aesthetic immediately proves its worth to a wide audience, from readers interested in race and U.S. literature to those seeking guidance to the contemporary literary scene.”

—Timothy Yu, author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965

Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University.