“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
“Nguyen provides a well-reasoned justification for considering refugees as figures instead of subjects. . . . The book unfolds a compelling, if cynical, story of how thoroughly power functions.” — Thy Phu, Pacific Affairs
“Nguyen’s compelling discussion of the discursive construction of the Vietnamese refugee as a gendered subject, as both an arbiter for peace and forgiveness, as well as an agent of US state violence, left me with further productive questions: How are bio- and necropolitical discourses of freedom always already constituted in relation to gender and sexuality? How does the ‘gift of freedom’ constitute queer subjects? While the answers to these questions may exist beyond the scope of this text, the theoretical framework introduced by Nguyen provides a generative starting point for future feminist and queer critiques of the ‘gift of freedom.’” — Gina Velasco, International Feminist Journal of Politics
“In writing about Vietnamese refugees, Nguyen actually helps us to grow links with studies of Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim racialization in and outside of the United States, as well as other assemblages of subjects that might also find themselves the targets in new wars for freedom.” — Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, Journal of Asian American Studies
“This book is provocative and challenging, and raises key questions in theoretical and contemporary discourse.” — Jana K. Lipman, Journal of American Studies
“Nguyen…productively evaluate[s] and incisively interrogate[s] the indebted cultural politics and racial formations that remain at the forefront of Asian-American Studies.” — Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, College Literature
“Nguyen’s book is tremendously convincing. [It] is ambitious but soundly conceived and refreshingly well written. This book should prove instructive to scholars in areas where writerly sensitivity—generous engagement with ambiguous texts and the confidence to ask speculative, even oblique questions—is perhaps not as lauded as it should be.” — Nicholas Gamso, Women's Studies Quarterly
“Nguyen offers a refreshing perspective on cultural formations rarely researched in area studies, and The Gift of Freedom is a major contribution to Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic studies. As such, this book is recommended to scholars of cultural studies, critical race studies, immigration and migration studies, transnationalism, Asian American studies, and Asian studies.” — Laura Ha Reizman, Journal of Asian Studies
"The Gift of Freedom extrapolates from its case studies to make an arresting argument that freedom, especially when it is routed through liberal personhood, 'is not simply a ruse for liberal war but its core proposition' (xii)." — Russ Castronovo, American Literature
"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