The Meanings of Land: Theorizing Impossible Subjectivities

• In Event: Hmong Americans and Creative Placemaking in the Empire

Abstract

This paper examines Hmong American poet Mai Der Vang’s book of poetry Afterland to theorize the concept of “impossible subjectivity” and its connection to a Hmong sense of place within the context of refugee displacement from Laos and resettlement in the United States. Positioning Vang as a critical refugee studies theorist in her own right by linking her interviews, essays, and book of poetry, I extract the linkages between subjectivity and place formed through the crevices and ruptures of war. I argue that Hmong subjectivities of place are not easily concretized in hegemonic concepts of land understood through land acquisition, geopolitical expansion, and environmental destruction. Vang’s intellectual and creative work, and the various themes found within them such as the critique of United States imperialism, intergenerational discord, and recreation of ethnic and racialized subjectivities in the aftermath of war, enables the emergence of a queer and feminist poetics of minoritized existence and ontological experience beyond liberal identitarian politics rooted within normative geographies, into the realm of the impossible.

Author

• Kong Pheng Pha, University of Wisconsin-Madison