Almost Futures

Almost Futures looks to the people who pay the heaviest price exacted by war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist at the end of our future’s promise. In order to learn from the lives destroyed (and lived) amid our inheritance of modern humanism and its uses of time, Almost Futures asks us to recognize new spectrums of feeling: the poetic, in the grief of protesters dispossessed by land speculation; the allegorical, in assembly line workers’ laughter and sorrow; the iterant and intimate, in the visual witnessing of revolutionary and state killing; the haunting, in refugees’ writing on the death of their nation; and the irreconcilable, in refugees’ inhabitation of history.

“Almost Futures is a tour de force. Within the immediate contexts of Vietnam studies and critical refugee studies, the book stands out as sui generis in its theoretical sophistication, interdisciplinary rigor, and beautiful prose. In a word, it is incomparably in a class by itself.” — JODI KIM, author of Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries

“This is a truly singular study: it contends with the ghosts of Vietnam in material, conceptual, and aesthetic modes, and it is a book that belongs to the humanities in the broadest possible sense of the word, to include a resonant understanding of humanism and humanity.” — JOSEPHINE NOCK-HEE PARK, School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

NGUYỄN-VÕ THU-HƯƠNG is Professor of Asian American Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.