Preface  ix

Acknowledgments  xiii

Introduction. The Empire of Freedom  1

1. The Refugee Condition  33

2. Grace, the Gift of the Girl in the Photograph  83

3. Race Wars, Patriot Acts  133

Epilogue. Refugee Returns  179

Notes  191

Bibliography  239

Index  267

“The Gift of Freedom is a bold, rich and sophisticated study providing significant contribution to current literature. . . . It forges new ground in the burgeoning disciplines of Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Studies while advancing the fields of memory studies, affect studies, refugee studies,and cultural studies, offering powerful insights into the far-reaching,inescapable hold that the gift of freedom has over all our precarious lives.”
—LongT.Bui, Journal of Vietnamese Studies

“The Gift of Freedom is a bold, rich and sophisticated study providing significant contribution to current literature. . . . It forges new ground in the burgeoning disciplines of Vietnamese and Vietnamese American Studies while advancing the fields of memory studies, affect studies, refugee studies,and cultural studies, offering powerful insights into the far-reaching,inescapable hold that the gift of freedom has over all our precarious lives.”
—LongT.Bui, Journal of Vietnamese Studies

"The Gift of Freedom is a dazzling book. Focusing on the figure of the Vietnamese refugee as a key to comprehending how the rhetoric of U.S. liberalism and freedom became hegemonic during the Cold War and in the contemporary post-9/11 period, Mimi Thi Nguyen offers an original approach to rethinking Cold War politics and U.S. liberal freedom."—David L. Eng, author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

"The product of strikingly incisive thinking, The Gift of Freedom is a luminous theoretical contribution to our understanding of the terms and tactics of liberal modernity."—Kandice Chuh, author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique

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