Nguyen-Vo

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Almost Futures looks to the people who pay the heaviest price exacted by war and capitalist globalization--particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees--for glimpses of ways to exist at the end of our future’s promise. In order to learn from the lives destroyed (and lived) amid our inheritance of modern humanism and its uses of time, Almost Futures asks us to recognize new spectrums of feeling: the poetic, in the grief of protesters dispossessed by land speculation; the allegorical, in assembly line workers’ laughter and sorrow; the iterant and intimate, in the visual witnessing of revolutionary and state killing; the haunting, in refugees’ writing on the death of their nation; and the irreconcilable, in refugees’ inhabitation of history.

Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương is Professor of Asian American Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.