Friday, November 4, 2022 | 3pm to 5pm
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue – Sociology Lounge, GC Room 6112
Note: This is an in-person and virtual event, with a reception following the talk. In accordance with CUNY COVID-19 policies, all non-CUNY attendees who wish to attend in-person must register in advance through Eventbrite. Please bring in your vaccination proof or a negative test result taken within seven days of the event.
When the Berlin Wall fell, Germany united in a wave of euphoria and solidarity. Also caught in the current were Vietnamese border crossers who had left their homeland after its reunification in 1975. Unwilling to live under socialism, one group resettled in West Berlin as refugees. In the name of socialist solidarity, a second group arrived in East Berlin as contract workers. The Border Within paints a vivid portrait of these disparate Vietnamese migrants’ encounters with each other in the post-socialist city of Berlin. Journalists, scholars, and Vietnamese border crossers themselves consider these groups that left their homes under vastly different conditions to be one people, linked by an unquestionable ethnic nationhood. Phi Hong Su’s rigorous ethnography unpacks this intuition. In absorbing prose, Su reveals how these Cold War compatriots enact palpable social boundaries in everyday life. This book uncovers how 20th-century state formation and international migration—together, border crossings—generate enduring migrant classifications. In doing so, border crossings fracture shared ethnic, national, and religious identities in enduring ways.
Purchase Book: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32854
Co-Sponsors
CUNY Graduate Center Immigration Seminar Series
CUNY Graduate Center – MA Program in International Migration Studies
CUNY Graduate Center – PhD Program in Sociology and Advanced Research Collaborative
Asian American/Asian Research Institute – CUNY
Hunter College/CUNY Asian American Studies Program & Center
