Frayed Memories, Re-imagined Belongings. Southeast Asian Post-refugee Generations in France

Abstract

The communist takeover in 1975 and post-war developments in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos catalyzed a massive exodus of refugees, some 125,000 of whom were resettled in France. Despite the growth, both in size and in complexity, of the Southeast Asian communities in France over the last five decades, little is known about these populations, and even less about the post-refugee generations, their identities, and politics, and especially their relationship to their parent’s traumatic history of migration. The invisibility of Asians in France has enabled myths and assumptions about these communities, both positive and negative, to persist unchallenged. This article aims to shed light on the post-refugee generations of Southeast Asians in France. Drawing insights from academics, researchers, journalists, filmmakers, writers, community organizers, and advocates, it engages some of the critical questions that inform the identity and politics of the Southeast Asian post-refugee generations in France, centering on questions of historical traumas and identity construction, representation, belonging, and activism. It advances the notion of refugee communities as sites of active knowledge production, and foregrounds refugee agency by giving voice to refugees and their descendants. In so doing, it aims not only to highlight experiences, concerns, and perspectives that have been obscured or marginalized but also to showcase the agency, resistance, and reclaim that are manifested in different ways, forms, and contexts in the individual and collective responses of Southeast Asians to the challenges that confront them in France.

Keywords

• refugees
• post-refugee generations
• memories
• representation
• prejudices
• trauma