From the Central Highlands’ rugged peaks to the island of Koh Kra, histories of return, pushbacks, capture, and catastrophe span the shores of Southeast Asia to the coasts of New Orleans—an irregular tapestry of politicized and war-torn spaces entangled by a people cast adrift. My dissertation, "The Ark is Already Gone: A History of Boat Refugee Non-Arrival," proposes a subversive history of the global Vietnamese boat refugee exodus by turning to sites of surplus and fallout across the South China Sea and the U.S. Gulf South in the aftermath of imperial civil war. Attentive to non-linear routes and points of interruption that detract from the predictability of refugee movements from the homeland to asylum, this project insists on a deterritorialized analytical framework that emphasizes the vernacular experience of boat migration, or a “history from below” that engages the materialism of boats, ships, and islands as palimpsests of the residual time of slavery and indenture.

 

The project conceptualizes what I term “non-arrival,” an epistemology of drifting and itinerancy that resists the teleological construction of migration history and its conventional “two-shore” approaches, which has heretofore conditioned the expectation of migrant arrival at state borders through the sociological cataloging of entries, exits, and intakes at refugee camps and asylum countries. Instead, by investigating the absent time of multilingual archives and oral histories, where missing lives continue to haunt survival narratives, I uncover the non-vectors of migration where boats and migrants disappeared with little trace—unable to resettle or arrive at refuge.