This unit interrogates Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees through a transdisciplinary lens, moving beyond the "immigrant success story" to examine the exilic subject. The unit is designed to scale from International Baccalaureate Diploma Program English courses (Focus: Identity & Perspective) to Undergraduate Cultural Studies (Focus: Post-colonial Theory, Structuralism, & Hegemony). In dialogue with Nguyen's Nothing Ever Dies students analyze how the "Refugee" is a subject constructed by ideological apparatuses, collective trauma, and intergenerational echoes.
Jacques Derrida: Hauntology
Focusing on “Black-Eyed Women,” we apply the concept of the specter. In Nguyen’s work, ghosts are not supernatural figures but manifestations of unresolved historical trauma that fracture the linear narrative of the present. Hauntology reframes the refugee’s return as impossible yet inevitable—the past insists upon being witnessed. Derrida’s specter thus becomes the ideal figure for Nguyen’s narratives: the refugee continually reclaims a presence the world insists on forgetting.
Edward Said: Orientalism & Exile
Students use Said’s framework to analyze how the refugee is constructed as Other within Western discourse. In “The Other Man,” we examine the shifting power dynamics between the Western gaze and the orientalized subject, uncovering how assimilation becomes both survival and erasure. Building on Said, we introduce the concept of the Immigrant Ceiling—a metaphor for the structural and psychological confines that demand perpetual gratitude and compliance. Nguyen’s fiction exposes this ceiling as both invisible and omnipresent, forcing refugees to perform belonging while never truly being at home.
Louis Althusser: Interpellation & The Eternal Refugee
We investigate how institutions—schools, media, camps—function as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) that reproduce the “refugee” identity, demanding assimilation and complicity while marking the subject as permanently foreign. Through Nguyen’s stories, readers see how ideology works at the level of emotion and habit: the refugee internalizes surveillance, gratitude, and silence. Althusser’s framework helps reveal Nguyen’s critique of state benevolence—the idea that humanitarianism, though well-intentioned, often reinforces the hierarchies it claims to dissolve.
Jacques Lacan: The Triadic Subject
Each displaced figure negotiates fractured identities formed in the Imaginary—attachments to lost homelands and idealized selves—while struggling under the Symbolic order of assimilation, language, and history that never fully recognizes them. The trauma of dislocation manifests as the return of the Real, where memory and desire erupt beyond rational containment. Through Lacan’s notion of méconnaissance, the characters’ attempts at self-coherence continually fail, revealing subjectivity as an effect of linguistic and cultural loss—the perpetual gap between speech and silence, self and Other, illuminating exile as the core condition of the postcolonial subject.