Un/Propertied Refugees: Technocapital, Resettlement, and Housing Crisis in the Viet/Afghan Equation

• In Event: Technocapitalism, Anticommunism, and Technofascism in Late-Stage US Empire and Beyond

Abstract

In Fall 2021, the Associated Press published an editorial by Amy Taxin entitled “We Were Them: Vietnamese Americans Help Afghan Refugees.” The editorial details how former Vietnamese refugees in Seattle mobilize their surplus vacation homes for the resettlement of Afghan families at the sunsetting of U.S. occupation in Afghanistan. The editorial, rather than positioned as a “strange affinity” that would lay bare the imperial conditions linking both displacement episodes there and techno-mediated housing crisis, reproduced the discourse of the Vietnamese refugee as beneficiary of Cold War violence, focusing especially on those who have spared their Airbrb vacation rental homes to house these new refugees, importing its logics into the construction of the Afghan refugee.

This talk focuses on the ideologies of private property, technocapital, and the reproduction of the race-neutral homo economicus subject within this narrative. I analyze how private property and technocapital’s production of housing crisis is recuperated, reproduced, and trafficked through the refugee-cum-landlord figure and the Vietnamese/Afghan equation in a moment when the systematic reign of expropriation under capital has accelerated under fascist conditions. I ask: what Asian American “homeownership politics”, as Brian Su-Jen Chung writes, are evinced through this narrative? How is the refugee positioned to retroactively recuperate war through property ownership, and vice versa? How is technocapital’s production of housing crisis absolved and naturalized through the refugee figure? What teleologies of selfhood are signified through this property narrative? How does racial liberalism reproduce yet obfuscate the conditions that exploit other racialized and classed subjects through the bolstering of this figure?

Author

• Trung Nguyen, San Jose State University