Reading in Community with Refugee Lifeworlds

In March of 2023, the three of us—all graduate students at the University of British Columbia (UBC)—facilitated a series of reading groups on Y-Dang Troeung’s Refugee Lifeworlds. The first meeting, held on campus at UBC, focused on life writing and autotheory in Y-Dang’s work, while the second, held in Vancouver’s Chinatown, centred on themes of silence, debility, and worldmaking. Following Y-Dang’s passing, we were driven by a desire to encounter her work in community, in shared spaces of collective grief and learning. For those of us who knew her as a teacher, these reading groups were a chance to return to her classroom once more by embodying the practice of reading in community she modelled in her ethos, pedagogy, and scholarly work. Her teaching inhabits Refugee Lifeworlds, guiding us to learn in community as we taught the text.

When planning the facilitation of the reading groups, we were inspired by how Troeung’s pedagogical and theoretical approaches permeate her creative and critical work. Troeung writes, “The refugee intimates a world to come—a world increasingly straining under the pressures of empire, global capitalism, and climate insecurity” (17). Beginning with the refugee as a point of departure offers a lens through which to analyze regimes of global capital and colonialism that create the conditions of violence and asymmetry that produce the refugee subject, while also attending to the lifeworlds that emerge in the interstices of such debilitation (ix). Our facilitation was guided by her skilful use of autotheory: the balance of specificity and relationality in her text taught us in real time, as we sought both to discuss Refugee Lifeworlds in the specific context of Troeung’s analysis of Cambodian refugee experiences and to reflect on how these same themes emerge in the different contexts of Asian diaspora that we live and study.

Troeung cites Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “speaking nearby,” a “position of ethical proximity” that enables thinking with and alongside other community histories and experiences in generative ways that foster relationalities and resonances without appropriation (Troeung 41). Taking up this invitation to consider interconnection, we opened one reading group meeting by taking turns reading aloud a paragraph of the text, which then led to discussions about our own relationships to the stories. We saw this reading in community as both a practice and an ethical approach to pedagogy that embraces resonances across contexts, fields, and sites of knowledge, allowing us to imagine and enact scholarship responsive to people, relations, and community. Reading in community is undisciplined. It invites people to encounter critical work through their own experiences while thinking carefully about responsibilities to the work and each other. It is community-building. It activates and animates critical work by situating it within an ethical relation to the world. It is these lessons from Troeung’s writing that keep us in continuous conversation with her and each other.

Works Cited

Troeung, Y-Dang. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022.

Olivia Lim is a graduate of the MA in English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on transnational Asian literatures, critical disability studies, debility, redress, and the Cold War in Asia. She holds a BA (Honours) in English Literature and Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies from the University of British Columbia.

Elaina Nguyen holds an MA in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia. Her thesis drew from Vietnamese Canadian artistic productions to explore understandings of collective futurity. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts and Science from McMaster University.

David Ng is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, activist, and academic. He is the co-artistic director of Love Intersections, a media arts collective of queer artists of colour with a mandate to share intersectional stories through art. He is a research associate for Hello Cool World Media, a social justice communications firm, and he is also the project lead for Cultivating Kin, which is an initiative to decolonize the Canadian art system by putting Indigenous arts practices at the centre. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. He holds a Master of Social Sciences from the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. https://davidng.art