This talk explores the use of speculation in refugee writing and politics, particularly within the context of Southeast Asian diasporas. I’m interested in how refugee narratives engage with unknowns and absences, impossible realities or unverifiable truths, how they deal with loss without reverting to more conventional frameworks such as trauma, mourning, or memory. I discuss how speculation breaks away from, or at least challenges, the usual demands of testimony, truth-telling, and realism that circumscribe refugee cultural and literary expression. I consider “speculative work” against “memory work,” which has significantly shaped migration, refugee, and war studies as well as Asian North American studies for decades. I suggest that speculation does not simply pick up where memory reaches its limits, but that speculation is a fundamentally necessary practice within the afterlives of war and the conditions of displacement. Speculation is an experiment in inhabiting refugee ruins, remains, and renewals.
Bio: Vinh Nguyen a writer and educator. He is the author of the academic book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience and the speculative memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse. His work has appeared in Brick, LitHub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, and Grain. He is a non-fiction editor at The New Quarterly and a staff writer at The Hamilton Review of Books.
