In this book the author examines the technologies of government - policies, programmes, codes and practices that attempt to instill in citizen-subjects particular values. The author follows Cambodian refugees in their transition through different modalities of government from the Buddhist absolutism of modern Cambodia, the policing state of Khmer rouge, the mediating world of refugee camps and the advanced liberal democracy of the United States. Each context calls for a different modality of what it is to be human and how life is valued and classified in relation to political calculations about labour, ethics and economy. This is evident in the story of Cambodian Americans, the most invisible racial group in the American consciousness, and their experience of American citizenship. Based on extensive fieldwork in California amongst Cambodian Americans, the author describes that after the experience with the Pol Pot regime, flight from Cambodia and learning to live in America, most have been obliged to break off from Khmer-Buddhist values to become new citizen-subjects through a process of being made by the system and self-making. They do this by balancing religious identity and entrepreneurial values and absorbing and deflecting conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting and mass culture. While their encounters with immigration authorities and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic and free, the American system and culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race and class. For these refugees dealing with this tension is a central dynamic in the ethical project of becoming citizens.

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refugee citizenship