Eric Tang’s book, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015), is an intimate ethnography of a single person, Ra Pronh, a fifty year old survivor of the Cambodian genocide, who afterwards spent nearly six years in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before moving to the Northwest Bronx in 1986. Through Ra’s story, Tang re-conceives of the refugee experience not as an arrival, but as a continued entrapment within the structures and politics set in place upon migration. Situating Ra’s story within a larger context of liberal warfare, Tang asks how the refugee narrative has operated as a solution to Americas imperial wars overseas, and to its domestic wars against its poorest residents within the hyperghetto.

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