For the refugee, it seems that war never ends. Almost five decades after the fall of Saigon, the reverberations of the Second Indochina War continue to live and be hidden in refugee minds and bodies. Among the millions displaced by the war, Hmong people, many of whom were crucial American allies in the CIA-led “Secret War” against communism in Laos, find themselves fugitives in a dilemmatic secret of American imperialism.

In History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies, Hmong American scholar Ma Vang powerfully articulates this position of secrecy through Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's concept of “fugitivity” in Black radical tradition “as a way of being and thinking within and outside the institutions of the university and archive . . . to assert a politics of evasion in movement/migration” (p. 14). Situated at the intersection of critical ethnic studies and critical refugee studies, Vang's work contributes to the interrogation of ongoing imperial aftermaths alongside scholars such as Yến-Lê Espiritu and Eric Tang. Grounded in the “refugee epistemologies” framework, the book makes an important intervention by illuminating how refugee subjectivities are produced by the covert nature of a war that has consigned their experiences to invisibility and unspeakability.

Secrecy is articulated in the book as a rupture of the hegemonic official knowledge regimes. Vang's analysis moves beyond simplistic formulations of secrecy as absolute oppression to theorize it as a strategy for the oppressed to survive and resist subjugation through alternative ways of being and knowing. Her thesis that “both transparency and secrecy form democracy” (p. 35) resonates with Derrida's idea of “justice in the secret,” which asserts that obliterating secrecy would equal a “totalitarianization of democracy by the politics of transparency.”Footnote ¹

These paradigms of fugitivity and refugee epistemologies permeate Vang's methodology. Following Ann Laura Stoler's approach of reading against the “archival grain,”Footnote ² Vang goes beyond historical records to excavate information from alternative sites of knowledge, including archival gaps and embodied memories, to tease out layers of silent and silenced narratives of Hmong refugees. This method allows her to uncover epistemic violences immanent in the archiving practice, which excludes certain voices and refuses to fully disclose information even after declassification. The state archive, however, is constantly being contested and reworked by the “refugee archive,” whose incomplete and indeterminate revelations keep resurfacing in quotidian acts of “dragging histories” and “articulating silences” (pp. 147–56). Here, silence—the absence of knowledge—offers a presence of knowledge for telling untold stories. Fugitivity epistemes thus influence the making and circulating of knowledge by both the state and the refugee in a process of dialectical negotiation.

Chapter 1 provide the historical background of the Secret War and the production of Laotian Hmong as American ally soldiers and racial refugees. Vang explores “secrecy,” “fugitivity,” and “refugee epistemologies” as the foundation of the Hmong refugee subject formation and ways to rethink refugee subjectivities. Chapter 2 expounds on these themes in America's geopolitical erasure of Laos and missing things in archives as methodology. As American clandestine military maneuvering in Laos makes official records of CIA-trained Hmong soldiers practically unavailable, Vang instead looks to archival absences and concealment, as well as refugee camps records and refugee bodies. Chapter 3 examines the refugee soldier figure in the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act of 1997. This legal attempt to solve the refugee problem encounters a dilemma: recognizing the Hmong as citizens requires exposing America's furtive war activities in Laos, and the politics of humanitarian citizenship draws precisely from the depiction of their “Otherness.” Chapter 4 investigates the terrorist ally figure in the 2007 arrest of General Vang Pao, the Hmong military and community leader, for attempting to overthrow the Laos government. As past war trauma and violence constantly risk resurfacing in the refugee's body through what Vang calls the “an/archive” (p. 123), the seeming oxymoron of the “terrorist ally” is actually consistent with American global militarism. Both of these paradoxical figures unsettle the state's narrative of citizenship as the ultimate solution to past war brutality, as they unmask the US empire's liberal militarism as key to their production.

In chapter 5, Vang's feminist interpretation of the grandmother figure in Kao Kalia Yang's book The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir and the Hollywood movie Gran Torino offers a poignant manifestation of the fugitivity epistemology, which sees gendered refugee bodies as alternative sites of knowledge. Since the grandmother's traumatic memories are deeply inscribed onto her body, they continue to resurface through her everyday acts, even when remaining untold and constantly evading complete revelation. Her simultaneous storytelling and silence thus allow for “history on the run” to reemerge. Vang also highlights the importance of “collective remembering” as a way for Hmong American families and communities to “seek refuge in each other” by co-constructing memories and opening up the possibility for collective healing (p. 156).

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Vang strings together data and theories from various fields, resulting in a multilayered, complex work. Therefore, academics and students from multiple disciplines can all find it relevant and rewarding from different angles. For readers unfamiliar with the diverse frameworks she uses, however, this complexity can make the text sometimes challenging, as at times it is unclear how she arrives at a particular conclusion. Nonetheless, such perplexity might intrigue the audience to delve deeper into the topic. Vang also embraces multiple levels of intimacy in her approach, moving from a broad, dispassionate review of history to a close inspection of case studies and an affecting look at refugee media and literature. The book presents a powerful voice to retell the refugee's “history on the run,” one that defies traditional archiving and encapsulates a rich body of knowledge to destabilize imperialist projects.