Refugeography in "post-Racial" America: Bao Phi's Activist Poetry

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes Bao Phi's neologism "refugeography" as a poetics - a mode of expression and a politics, a way of perceiving and being in the world - that critically expands the "refugee" category. Reading Phi's collection Sông I Sing: Poems (2011), I argue that refugeography signifies the psychic landscape of refugee subjectivity, the scope of refugee subjects (agents and topics), and the physical places of refugee movement and dwelling. This "geographically" capacious concept enlarges the purview of the refugee, insisting that racialization on American shores, police brutality, Asian American identity, diasporic consciousness, and social justice activism along with imperialism, foreign war, and forced migration are "refugee" concerns. For Phi, it is by way of war and empire's human rem(a)inders that larger issues of identity politics, resistance to oppression, panethnic solidarity, and displacement and rootedness come to the foreground and are shown to be ongoing contemporary contestations in supposedly "post-racial" times. Refugeography thus is an enabling concept, one that begins with the figure of the refugee but does not necessarily end there. It is expansive and wide-ranging in the way it explores and sketches out subjectivities, changing positionalities, and physical geographies while promoting and celebrating Asian American community and identity.