Exploring "refuge" and "refugee" as concepts that shape Canadian nation-building both within and beyond national borders, Refugee States takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach to describing how refugees articulate their relation to and defiance of official discourses. Through close examinations of refugee movements, contexts, and subjectivities, this collection reveals how Canada has relied upon the rejection and inclusion of refugees as a crucial means of statecraft.

Bringing together renowned and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines, Nguyen and Phu illuminate the historical, political, and cultural conditions that produce refugees as well as the narrative of humanitarian benevolence that persists nationally and internationally. Highlighting landmark cases, the editors and contributors together develop critical refugee studies as a framework for understanding, nuancing, and critiquing the production of Canadian humanitarian exceptionalism – the international image and discourse of Canada as a liberal, tolerant, and welcoming haven for people fleeing oppression, persecution, and unfreedom. In doing so, Refugee States offers alternative modes of understanding past and present refugee passages to and within Canada, and brings to light the many ways in which refugee subjects navigate displacement, migration, and resettlement.

VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator. His work appears in Brick, LitHub, the Malahat Review, PRISM International, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, the Criterion Collection and MUBI Notebook. A non-fiction editor at the New Quarterly, he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant and diasporic writing. He is the editor and author of three academic books, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada; The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives; and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. Currently, Nguyen is a cultural consultant and consulting writer for the hit CBC sitcom Run the Burbs. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and he received the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in non-fiction at the Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

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Thy Phu is a professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

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