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Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương. Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge at World’s End. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024.

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: As the unsettling affairs of our world unfold in the second quarter of the 21st century, Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge at World's End offers timely and invaluable insights.In this simultaneously expansive, complex, and intimate work, Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương meditates on the continual paradoxes and injustices that shape and connect local and global lives.While it centers primarily Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese contexts, this unique work also tran scends boundaries and links stories beyond Vietnam and the Vietnamese refugee diaspora to reveal the relationality between "people who were barred from humanist sovereignty while subjected to its violence" across epochs and continents (p.24).Focusing on exploited workers, refugees, and others subjected to different forms of colonial, revolutionary, and state violence and global capitalist dispossession, the book bears witness to the lives, deaths, grief, resistance, and silence of those "who paid the highest price for living in the catastrophes of our modern world" (p.4).Yet, as Nguyễn-võ also reminds us, "Even while held down to a less-than-human status, the people I follow in this book impossibly marched, grieved, struck, organized, spoke, painted, wrote, remembered or forgot, and sometimes stayed silent" (p.4).Attending to how they insisted on their humanity, dignity, creativity, relationships, and even silence-however fleeting, opaque, fragmented, illegible-yields critical lessons for how to confront the hauntings, uncertainties, contradictions, and violence of our own time and place.Almost Futures is an unparalleled text in breadth and depth that intricately layers and weaves together rich theoretical insights from critical refugee studies, political economy theo ries, Vietnamese studies, and feminist, Black, Queer, disability, and Indigenous studies as well as the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people to address various marginalized and inter secting human conditions.The book exposes the inherent violence and limits of humanist sovereignty and insists on poetic, allegorical, iterant, haunted, and untimely ways of knowing that refuse the linear, redemptive, and progressive march toward the future promised by the
DOI: 10.20495/seas.br25009
Institution: Yale University
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7133565799
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