Unsettled

Eric Tang is Assistant Professor in African and African Diaspora Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Scrupulous, courageous and fiercely argued, Unsettled is an ethnographic revelation. . . . Tang, a former organizer, brings to light the political ecology of a community that has survived war, genocide, and displacement and is now struggling to remake the Bronx hyperghetto, exposing in the process the ‘impossible’ condition that may be the fate of all refugee communities in the neoliberal city.” -Junot DÍaz“Scholar-activist Eric Tang has written a brilliantly moving account of how politics, community dynamics, and family relationships shape life for Cambodian refugees who settled in the Bronx in the 1980s and 1990s. Unsettled is at once a stunning ethnography, a superb critical cultural studies project, and an outstanding example of engaged scholarship that will inspire new understandings about the movement of people and the creation of particular kinds of contested spaces. Tang’s riveting account of struggle, change, and resistance is a remarkable achievement.”-Beth Richie, Professor of African American Studies and Criminology, Law and Justice at University of Illinois at Chicago“Unsettled is a contribution to the emergent field of ‘critical refugee studies,’ and documents a story of Cambodian refugee itinerancy and survival. Not an account of a transition from refugee hardship to redemptive U.S. citizenship, it is rather a description of uprooting, captivity, poverty, displacement, and fugitivity-and the ever elusive project of ‘arrival.’”-Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University