From the Central Highlands’ rolling hills to the island of Koh Kra, histories of return, pushbacks, capture, and catastrophe span the shores of Southeast Asia to the depths of the ocean—an irregular tapestry of politicized and war-torn spaces entangled by a people cast adrift. My dissertation-to-book project, The Ark is Already Gone: A History of Boat Refugee Non-Arrival, examines the vernacular experiences of boat refugees as they navigate the longue durée of imperial warfare, sovereign and extralegal violence, migrant economization, and catastrophe after the Vietnam wars.

 

The project analyzes multiple sites of drifting, disappearance, and wreckage across the South China Sea to bring together a history of “non-arrival,” an analytical framework for charting the non-linear transits and surplus material realities that do not condition the nation-state or refuge as naturalized endpoints of forced migration.

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Challenging state-centric narratives that frequently position boat refugees within temporal (refugee to resettlement) or spatial (homeland to asylum) trajectories, which privilege survivorship and national arrival, the dissertation turns instead to ellipses in the historical record—the Indigenous highlanders and others abandoned during the Fall of Saigon, those caught or left behind in the homeland between 1975 and 1992, thousands of lives lost to starvation, thirst, and unpredictable elements at sea, and incidents of boat pushback and deferred arrivals in Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.

 

I locate these elliptical histories in photographed vanishings and by studying the historical materialism of vessels scattered across former refugee campsites and immersed as shipwrecks beneath the ocean. Within these sites of catastrophe and bare life, the project argues for “non-arrival” as an alternative refugee epistemology that honors acts of survival, making do, and circumvention, which map divergent social relations and illicit mobilities that transcend the boundaries of historical, archival, and state frameworks.

 

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