Hmong Americans and Creative Placemaking in the Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

The United States’ “secret war” in Laos from 1960 to 1975 marked the convergence of Cold War politics, anti-communist ideologies, anti-Asian racism, geopolitical expansion, and Western colonialism in Southeast Asia. In conjunction with the larger war in Vietnam, the “secret war” in Laos represents a unique moment of U.S. empire, as the war destroyed much of the Southeast Asian environment and subsequently produced the displacement and resettlement of over one million Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong refugees to the U.S. Southeast Asian American Studies, and specifically critical Hmong studies, have illuminated what it means to be subjects of decolonial struggles, and what it means to be the remainders/reminders of empire fifty years later. This panel analyzes “place” from a Hmong perspective, complicating the places and spaces of war, both in Laos and within the Hmong diaspora. We ask, how does cultural production, such as literature, poetry, and film critique and reframe notions of home, place, and space? What critical Hmong studies politics emerges both immediately after the end of the “secret war” in Laos and within the U.S. empire’s ongoing atrocities against human and environmental life in Palestine, Hawai’i, and Puerto Rico? How can Hmong American lived realities and cultural productions inform creative forms of redress that can speak toward human and environmental recovery? How have Hmong built homes in a place hostile to their very existence as displaced and stateless subjects? This panel argues that from the periphery of the empire–that is, from the perspective of a stateless people who labored as proxy soldiers in a secret war fueled by the U.S. empire’s imperial ambitions in Laos–we can rethink the connections between imperialism, displacement, migration, placemaking, and decolonization. At a time when the unimaginable violent eruptions of the late-stage American empire can engender despair, this panel offers alternative frameworks from scholars with unique vantage points on history to bear on how Hmong placemaking are forms of resistance against environmental catastrophes and violations of humanity. The papers on this panel sheds new light on U.S. imperial legacies and its role in shaping our current environmental and geopolitical situations, through the cultural and creative work of Hmong Americans.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• People-making Pedagogy: Refugee and Anti-imperialist Teaching - Ma Vang, University of California Merced

• Southeast Asian American Poetic Reckonings: Settler Colonialism and Refugee Placemaking - Aline Lo, Colorado College

• Where Two Rivers Meet: Literary Geography and Feminist Returns - Chong A Moua, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

• The Meanings of Land: Theorizing Impossible Subjectivities - Kong Pheng Pha, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Chair

• Kong Pheng Pha, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biographical Information

Ma Vang is associate professor of critical race and ethnic studies at University of California-Merced. Her book History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Duke University Press, 2021) examines how secrecy structures both official knowledge and refugee epistemologies about militarism and forced migration. She is also co-author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Aline Lo is assistant professor of English literature at Colorado College and is a scholar of American refugee literature and Hmong American Studies. Her recent publications include “Letting Karst Mountains Bloom: Decentering the Secret War in Hmong American Literature and Art,” which is a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (2023), and “Lives on Paper: The Terms of Refuge in the Life Writings of Ariel Dorfman and Kao Kalia Yang” published in American Studies (AMSJ).

Chong A. Moua is assistant professor of Hmong studies and History at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Her research interests center around the question of how immigration, race, gender, citizenship, and U.S. empire produce discourses of cultural and national belonging in 20th century U.S. history.

Kong Pheng Pha is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His book Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (University of Washington Press, 2025) analyzes the racial, gendered, sexual, and queer dimensions of Hmong social, cultural, and political life in the U.S. His scholarship has been published in the Hmong Studies Journal, Minnesota History, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, American Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and AGITATE! His public scholarship has been published in Aperture Magazine, Leader-Telegram, Reappropriate, Twin Cities Daily Planet, and Hmong Today. Additionally, his creative public humanities and community-based participatory research projects have been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation.