Hearts of Freedom: Stories of Southeast Asian Refugees. Peter Duschinsky, Colleen Lundy, Michael J. Molloy, Allan Moscovitch, and Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe. Foreword by Joe Clark. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025. Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, no. 20.
Northrop Frye observed that Canadian sensibility is less perplexed by “Who am I?” than by “Where is here?” (The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination). Hearts of Freedom resonates with this insight, as the refugees’ narratives reveal not only their own journeys but also who Canadians wanted to be, showing a nation aspiring to generosity, inclusion, and humanitarian engagement.
Hearts of Freedom is both a book and a wider public history initiative dedicated to preserving the voices of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees who arrived in Canada between 1975 and 1997. Drawing on 173 oral history interviews, the final one conducted with former Prime Minister Joe Clark, the editors have created an invaluable archive of lived experience that complements existing institutional accounts of the Indochinese resettlement program. Whereas earlier works such as Michael Molloy and Peter Duschinsky’s Running on Empty(2017) traced the diplomatic and bureaucratic machinery of resettlement, this volume turns deliberately to the refugees themselves; it foregrounds their voices and memories as the central historical evidence.
The book is organized thematically and by national origin, with chapters devoted to the experiences of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees. Early sections recount the violence, persecution, and dislocation that prompted flight—civil war, invasions, genocide, and perilous journeys by land and sea. Many of the interviewees tell their stories of being refugees through temporary camps in Thailand, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, before tracing their arrival in Canada. The narratives detail first impressions of climate, language, and cultural difference, alongside encounters with both the generosity of sponsors and the challenges of prejudice. The editors preserve the cadence of testimony, allowing survivors’ voices to remain central, while photographs, maps, and timelines situate these stories in their historical and geographic contexts.
The central contribution of Hearts of Freedom is to the social history of immigration and refugee settlement in Canada. The oral histories reveal not only personal trauma and resilience but also the crucial role of private citizens and community organizations in facilitating integration. Frequent mentions of “church ladies” highlight how ordinary Canadians, particularly women in faith communities, provided everyday care and advocacy that were essential to the refugees’ resettlement and sense of welcome. Readers are reminded of the transformative significance of Canada’s private sponsorship program, recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees with the 1986 Nansen Medal. These accounts reveal the program’s practical challenges and occasional failures; they also show its capacity to foster belonging and to reshape Canadian multiculturalism in the late twentieth century.
The volume’s strength lies in its breadth of testimony and the affective immediacy of the narratives. The stories convey in intimate detail what was at stake for families who risked everything to flee; they also reveal how newcomers encountered both welcome and exclusion in their new country. If there is a limitation, it lies in the difficulty of sustaining analytical coherence across such a wide range of experiences; the oral history format necessarily fragments, and at times readers may wish for more interpretive synthesis. Yet this very openness is also a virtue; it resists the tendency to impose a single, homogenizing narrative on a diverse refugee population.
For historians, Hearts of Freedom is indispensable as both a research source and a teaching text; it exemplifies the methodological rigour and interpretive nuance that oral history can bring to the study of migration. By centring refugee memory, the book extends the historiography of Canadian immigration beyond policy and institution centred narratives; it shows how first‑person testimony captures the lived experience of liminality, displacement, and adaptation, revealing social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of migration that conventional archival sources often overlook. For scholars of migration and liminal studies, the collection offers a model for integrating oral history with broader historical, sociopolitical, and cultural analysis, demonstrating how voices at the margins convey both individual agency and structural forces. For policymakers and community practitioners, it provides hard earned lessons about the critical importance of listening to those most affected by refugee regimes; the book shows how human experiences can shape program design, foster empathetic engagement, and deepen understanding of the complex dynamics of resettlement.
Crucially, Hearts of Freedom also prompts reflection on Canada itself. The resettlement of people from Southeast Asia was never only about those who arrived; it was also about those who received them. The unprecedented scale of private sponsorship, the debates in Parliament, and the work of immigration officials who designed and implemented new programs were matched by the readiness of thousands of Canadians to open their homes. Together, these efforts marked a political moment in which the country tested its aspirations as a humanitarian actor on the world stage. As the book notes, “[i]n Canada, we can live with and celebrate fluid identities” (p. 75). The refugees’ narratives reveal not only their own journeys but also who Canadians wanted to be; they show a nation striving toward generosity, inclusion, and global responsibility. It is this dual legacy; of refugees remaking their lives and of Canadians aspiring to embody their highest ideals; that gives Hearts of Freedom its enduring political and historical resonance.
You’re probably surprised to find us so inhospitable,” said the man, “but hospitality isn’t a custom here, and we don’t need any visitors.”
-The Castle, Franz Kafka
In my reading of Emily Wilson’s Iliad, xenia emerges as both sacred hospitality and a fraught instrument of power, inviting a reconsideration of the conflict’s origins beyond the conventional narrative. Traditionally, Paris’s taking of Helen is cast as a flagrant breach of xenia, the guest-host relationship foundational to Homeric ethics. Yet, attentive engagement with the text suggests that the arrogance of Menelaus and Agamemnon—expressed in their language and actions—may have already fractured this code, perhaps even before Helen’s departure, whether voluntary or otherwise.
Xenia (Greek: ξενία [kse'ni.a]) is an ancient Greek concept of hospitality. It is almost always translated as 'guest-friendship' or 'ritualized friendship'. Xenia was an institutionalised relationship grounded in reciprocity, gift exchange, and moral obligation. Rooted in the word xenos (stranger) it encompassed both material support and normative rights, linking guest and host through mutual respect.
This fracturing of xenia recalls the complex relationship between hospitality and power explored by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida*, who questioned the possibility of unconditional hospitality within the constraints of sovereignty and law. Derrida observed that hospitality is never purely generous but always mediated by conditions like borders, identities, and political authority. This insight resonates with the Iliad’s depiction of xenia, where the sacred duty to welcome the stranger exists alongside a real impulse to control and exclude. In this sense, the breach attributed to Paris appears less as an isolated offense and more as a symptom of a broader failure within the Greek leadership to practise genuine hospitality. Menelaus and Agamemnon’s arrogance acts not as a safeguard of order but as an instrument of domination, complicating the moral certainty of the Greek cause.
* Jacques Derrida’s reflections on hospitality remain crucial amid ongoing refugee crises. He highlights a fundamental tension: the moral duty to welcome strangers conflicts with the need to maintain borders that protect the home. Hospitality requires laws to distinguish guests from threats, making it both an act of openness and controlled closure. This balance is never fully resolvable but must always guide ethical and political responses to displacement and migration. More on Derrida at wikipedia.
From a philosophical perspective, this ambiguity aligns with Aristotle’s concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, which he considered essential to justice and effective governance. Neither Menelaus nor Agamemnon demonstrates this prudence. Their pride blinds them to the reciprocal duties that sustain social cohesion. Their focus on honour manifests as domination and retribution rather than balanced justice. This dynamic parallels Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the fragility of the public realm, where the collapse of mutual respect and responsibility leads to violence and alienation. The outbreak of war can therefore be seen as a tragic consequence of leadership that fails to embody virtues necessary for upholding xenia and, more broadly, the polis.
Furthermore, the question of Helen’s agency brings to mind Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the objectification of women in patriarchal societies. Helen’s portrayal as property rather than an autonomous subject reveals the limits of the ethical frameworks governing hospitality and honour. The violation of xenia in her case transcends guest-host betrayal and exposes gendered power relations that deny subjectivity. This complexity demands that we reconsider the roots of conflict in the Iliad as arising not only from personal transgressions but also from systemic injustice.
The Iliad presents Menelaus and Agamemnon as figures whose sense of entitlement verges on hubris. In Greek, Agamemnon’s epithet ἀρήϊος (arēios), “warlike” or “proud,” hints at his overbearing nature. His treatment of others, especially the lesser-ranked warriors, reveals a man for whom honour is inseparable from domination. Menelaus’s own conduct is marked by possessiveness and wrath, notably when he appeals to the Greeks to avenge his personal loss of Helen, framing the conflict in terms of his honour as a husband and king.
Noting the ritual sacrifices the Greeks must perform before setting sail for Troy, one perceives a subtle but telling indication that the gods’ favour is not assured, hinting at underlying tensions and possible guilt among the Greeks themselves. The necessity of these sacrifices suggests divine displeasure, an implicit acknowledgement that the Greeks may not be wholly innocent. This ritual moment opens a space for questioning the moral clarity of the Greeks’ cause, inviting reflection on whether their hubris and aggressive ambitions have already sown the seeds of conflict.
Philosophically, this recalls the ancient understanding that human actions are always subject to divine judgment, and that wars—even those framed as righteous—are rarely free from moral ambiguity. The Iliad thus offers a profound meditation on the limits of human pride and the consequences of violating sacred social bonds. The sacrifices foreshadow not only the calamities to come but also the possibility that the Greeks’ own arrogance and sense of entitlement have fractured the ethical foundation of their expedition, making the ensuing war less a response to a single violation and more a symptom of systemic breakdown.
This interpretation complicates the traditional victim-aggressor narrative by suggesting that the Greek leadership’s behaviour, including their claim to honour through domination, may have destabilized the delicate balance of xenia even before Helen’s departure. It invites us to see the war as the tragic outcome of a fractured social order where divine, ethical, and human considerations intersect, challenging the simplicity of blame and exposing the complex origins of violence in the poem.
This arrogance, I argue, destabilizes the very foundation of xenia. The sacred mutual respect between host and guest, governed by θεοί (theoi)—the gods who enforce these bonds—is undermined by the rulers’ domineering attitudes. If xenia depends on reciprocity and restraint, Menelaus and Agamemnon’s behaviour signals a breakdown of these conditions. Such a rupture may have made Helen’s departure inevitable or at least understandable, not simply as a consequence of Paris’s transgression but as a reaction to an oppressive and fractious social order.
The idea that xenia hinges on mutual respect and divine sanction highlights how fragile the social order truly is when those entrusted with upholding it act out of self-interest. The gods, as guardians of these sacred bonds, serve not only as enforcers but as reminders that human pride must be tempered by humility and justice. When Menelaus and Agamemnon assert their authority through domination rather than reciprocity, they risk not only alienating their allies but inviting divine disfavor—a peril that reverberates throughout the epic.
This breach extends beyond mere political or military strategy; it exposes the ethical limits of power within the heroic code. The rupture in xenia thus becomes a mirror reflecting deeper societal fractures, where honour is too often conflated with control and possession. The resulting tensions illuminate how fragile the ties of loyalty and hospitality are, especially when compounded by the weight of personal grievance and patriarchal dominance. In this context, Helen’s fate is less an isolated episode of betrayal and more a symptom of systemic failure—a consequence of a social fabric strained by arrogance and fractured hospitality.
Helen herself, positioned within a patriarchal framework, is rendered almost as οἰκέτις (oiketis), a household servant or property, thereby calling into question her agency. Whether she left of her own accord or was taken forcibly, the conditions shaping her departure emerge from a broader failure of xenia rooted in the arrogance and self-interest of those who claim to uphold it.
This reading aligns with Homeric philosophy wherein justice is intimately tied to εὐνομία (eunomia), good order, sustained by ethical relationships like xenia. The war’s eruption, then, is a tragic manifestation of the consequences when pride and power override these obligations.
Moreover, this interpretation resonates with contemporary political realities. Modern states often project ideals of openness while practicing exclusion and control, reflecting an ancient tension between hospitality’s ideal and its political reality. The Iliad exposes this tension, showing how claims to honour and order frequently mask mechanisms of exclusion.
This tension between the ideal and the practice of hospitality has long been a site of political and ethical anxiety. In ancient epic, as in modern geopolitics, the stranger often serves as both a test of virtue and a projection surface for anxiety about sovereignty, belonging, and threat. The Greek concept of xenia is not simply about generosity; it is also about the maintenance of status and the regulation of hierarchy. The guest must be treated with honour, yes, but also must not upset the established order of the host. In this way, hospitality reveals itself not as a neutral ethical good, but as a framework for establishing power relations under the guise of moral obligation.
Michel Foucault’s observations on the diffuse and disciplinary nature of power help clarify this reading. The host’s role, much like the sovereign’s, is not merely to offer welcome but to determine the terms on which that welcome occurs. This determination is political: it draws boundaries between who belongs and who must remain other. Within this framework, Menelaus and Agamemnon’s failure is not only in their pride, but in their assumption that their authority grants them a monopoly on the ethical terms of xenia. They weaponise hospitality, transforming it from a sacred obligation into a system of entitlement that reinforces their dominance.
Seen in this light, Paris’s violation may not represent the origin of the war so much as its pretext. The true breakdown lies in the way hospitality has already been co-opted by the Greeks as a form of political control. The gods’ demands for sacrifice before the expedition to Troy can thus be read not merely as a call for piety, but as a divine rebuke. The Greek cause, built on the claim of avenging a breach in hospitality, is already compromised by internal contradictions. What they claim to defend, they have already hollowed out.
This reading also aligns with the insights of thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, who argued that the ethical relation begins with the face of the Other, and that true hospitality requires openness to the stranger as stranger—not as subject to assimilation or control. In The Iliad, however, the stranger is always already caught in a web of possessive claims and reciprocal expectations. Paris, Helen, even Achilles—all are at some point positioned as both insider and outsider, welcomed and rejected, honoured and dishonoured. The poem’s structure is shaped by this unresolved dialectic between inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation.
If hospitality in Homeric terms is sacred, it is also perilous. It binds hosts and guests in fragile interdependence that can all too easily be ruptured by pride, possession, or fear. The violence of The Iliad may be read as the inevitable result of this fragility—an unraveling of social bonds that, once broken, cannot be easily repaired. The cost of such rupture is not only war but the loss of the ethical world that hospitality once promised to sustain.
Finally, in my reading of Wilson’s Iliad, the figures of Menelaus and Agamemnon come to embody the complexity of power’s role in the erosion of social bonds. Their arrogance does not simply mirror individual failings but signals a deeper, systemic disintegration of ethical obligations. Their conduct may well precede and provoke the chain of events so often attributed solely to Paris’s violation of xenia. What appears on the surface as a narrative of reactive justice begins, under closer scrutiny, to reveal itself as a story already compromised by pride, coercion, and a hollowing out of the very traditions the Greeks claim to defend. Agamemnon’s treatment of Achilles, his disregard for prophetic restraint, and his readiness to sacrifice his daughter are not incidental; they are emblematic of a sovereign power that mistakes command for moral authority. Menelaus likewise presents the war as a recovery of honour, but one suspects his sense of loss is tied more to control and possession than to any substantive ethical breach.
This reading of the Iliad, shaped by Wilson’s precision and restraint, destabilises the traditional victim-aggressor dichotomy that frames much of the epic’s reception. It offers a vision of conflict rooted not in a singular act of betrayal but in the slow corrosion of ethical responsibilities, especially those embedded in the sacred institution of xenia. What begins as a dispute over one woman’s departure unfolds into a meditation on the failure of reciprocity, the ease with which honour becomes entitlement, and hospitality’s transformation into a rationale for domination. Menelaus and Agamemnon are not merely victims seeking redress; they are active participants in the erosion of the very social order they claim to avenge.
This interpretation reveals the poem’s striking relevance to contemporary political conditions. The fragility of the social fabric, especially where hospitality is concerned, becomes a central issue. In my reading, the Iliad not only portrays the collapse of communal bonds but also warns of the consequences when the ethical obligation to honour the stranger is replaced by suspicion, conditional acceptance, or outright hostility. The ancient practice of xenia bears troubling parallels to modern systems of immigration, asylum, and border control. Like Menelaus and Agamemnon, modern states often claim to offer welcome while practising exclusion. Refugees and displaced people today frequently occupy a liminal state—neither fully included nor entirely excluded—shaped by policies that control their presence, voice, and movement. In many ways, they remain guests whose welcome is provisional and contingent upon submission to a host who can withdraw hospitality at any moment.
This liminal state is not unlike the condition of Helen in the poem. In my reading, Helen is not simply the cause of war but a figure caught between belonging and alienation, between desire and blame. She is both central and marginal, visible yet voiceless, possessed but never possessing. Her situation evokes the structural position of those today who, though ostensibly “welcomed,” are treated as liabilities rather than members of a moral community. The Iliad, understood this way, is not only a meditation on ancient war but a tragic account of what happens when traditions of welcome are degraded into mechanisms of control.
Emily Anhalt’s Enragedis instructive in this regard. Her study of rage in Homeric epic reveals how deeply anger is connected to the experience of dishonour within a failing moral order. This rage is not limited to Achilles alone but reflects a broader social anger born from betrayal by systems that promise dignity yet deliver subjugation. In my reading of Wilson’s translation, such rage, muted in Helen, contained within the Greek ranks, and projected outward onto Troy, emerges as a symptom of ethical collapse. Rage becomes the residue of violated hospitality, of traditions that are claimed but no longer upheld.
Thus, The Iliad, far from being merely a chronicle of ancient heroism, becomes in this reading a study of political and moral fragility. Its significance lies not in the repetition of heroic forms but in exposing how power, when separated from ethical responsibility, corrodes the very institutions that define civilisation. Hospitality, when stripped of its mutual obligations, stops being a virtue and instead becomes a display of dominance. In such a context, conflict is not accidental but inevitable. My reading of Wilson’s translation, attentive to these tensions, suggests that the poem endures because it grasps something fundamental about the conditions under which communities either thrive or collapse. Ultimately, the tragedy is not only that war occurs but that it follows logically from the betrayal of the values one claims to defend.
Helmet from the Etruscan Museum Rome – Villa Giulia 📸 by meExekias Amphora, Achilles and Ajax Engaged in a Game, Greek Pottery from the Vatican Museum 📸 by me
The first reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 signals a significant expansion of digital surveillance and data collection powers within immigration enforcement, including enhanced capabilities for electronic monitoring, biometric data use, and information sharing across agencies. These provisions illustrate how the state increasingly relies on computational systems to govern migration, embedding control within data infrastructures that produce visibility and legibility on its own terms. This legislative shift exemplifies the broader Data Turn—where algorithmic models and surveillance reshape who is recognized or excluded. Examining this through the lens of contemporary visual art reveals how artists expose and resist these mechanisms of control, offering critical counter-narratives that emphasize opacity, ambiguity, and the contested politics of representation in immigration regimes. This article stems from my reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 informed by Joy Rohde’s Armed with Expertise (that I just finished reading), connecting contemporary data-driven governance in immigration to its historical roots in Cold War expertise, and exploring how these dynamics shape the politics of visibility and liminality.
The Data Turn has reordered not just how states govern, but how they see. In systems of immigration control, policing, and security, governance now operates through data—through predictive models, biometric templates, and behavioral scores. These systems do not represent reality; they construct it, enacting a vision of the world in which subjects are rendered as variables and futures as risks. This logic, increasingly dominant across global institutions, marks a shift from rule by law to rule by model. And as it reconfigures power, it also reconfigures aesthetics.
This shift towards data-driven governance deeply affects how migratory subjects are categorized and controlled, often reducing complex human experiences to discrete data points subject to algorithmic prediction and intervention. The imposition of predictive models and biometric surveillance transforms migrants from individuals with agency into risks to be managed, their identities flattened into probabilistic profiles. This reordering not only reshapes bureaucratic practice but also redefines the conditions of visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion. Those caught in liminal states—between legality and illegality, presence and absence—are particularly vulnerable to these regimes of measurement and control, which perpetuate uncertainty and precarity.
Visual artists have responded to this transformation not only by thematizing data regimes, but by dismantling the very mechanisms that render them invisible. They expose the apparatus behind the interface—the wires, scripts, ideologies—and stage counter-visions that assert opacity, indeterminacy, and refusal. In doing so, they challenge the way the Data Turn governs the liminal, especially those living in the suspended space of migration, statelessness, and bureaucratic indeterminacy.
This artistic intervention reframes vision itself—not as a neutral or purely descriptive act, but as a tool of power embedded within technological and bureaucratic systems. By peeling back layers of digital mediation, these artists reveal how contemporary surveillance and data infrastructures actively produce knowledge and enforce hierarchies. Their work highlights that visibility is not simply about being seen, but about how one is seen, categorized, and ultimately governed—a dynamic that is especially acute for those inhabiting the ambiguous spaces of migration and statelessness.
Artists like Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl foreground this shift from image to instrument. In their work, surveillance footage, facial recognition outputs, and satellite tracking systems are not just visual materials—they are operational weapons. Paglen’s images of classified military sites or undersea data cables reveal the landscape of surveillance that underpins contemporary geopolitics. Steyerl, in pieces like How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, explores how machine vision abstracts, targets, and governs. In both cases, the act of seeing is no longer passive; it is a condition of being classified and controlled. The migrant, in such systems, is no longer a presence to be engaged but a deviation to be filtered—a datapoint, a heat signature, a probability.
Paglen and Steyerl’s work exposes the mechanisms through which visibility becomes a tool of control, transforming subjects into data points within vast systems of surveillance. Yet this logic of enforced legibility provokes a critical response: a turn toward opacity as a form of resistance. Where the state insists on clarity and categorization, artists embrace ambiguity and fragmentation, challenging the totalizing gaze and creating spaces where identity and presence refuse easy definition. This dialectic between exposure and concealment reflects the lived realities of migrants caught within regimes that demand transparency but offer exclusion.
If the state’s data infrastructures demand visibility and legibility, many artists respond with strategic opacity. Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of opacity—his insistence on the right not to be reduced—resonates powerfully here. In the works of Wangechi Mutu and Walid Raad, opacity takes material form: fragmentation, distortion, layering, and pseudofactuality unsettle any stable claim to truth or identity. These aesthetic strategies echo the experience of navigating migration regimes—systems that demand transparency from those who are systematically excluded from its protections. Opacity becomes a refusal of capture. It asserts a right to complexity in the face of an infrastructure that reduces lives to binary certainties.
I am guided here by the words of WG Sebald and the art of Gerhardt Richter and their use of things like dust and blur as integral to understanding of history and memory, in addition to the use of light and shadows in works of art immemorial and its relation to knowledge.
Building on this embrace of opacity, other artists turn their attention to archives—the sites where power not only records but also erases and shapes memory. By interrogating immigration documents, military footage, and bureaucratic data, these artists reveal how archives carry forward histories of violence and exclusion. Their work challenges the illusion of “raw” data, exposing it instead as deeply entangled with structures of power that continue to marginalize and render migrants invisible or precarious. In doing so, they create counter-archives that reclaim erased voices and insist on recognition beyond official narratives, mirroring the ongoing struggles of those living in legal and social liminality.
Other artists interrogate the archive: not just what is remembered, but how, by whom, and with what effects. The work of Forensic Architecture, Susan Schuppli, and Maria Thereza Alves reveals the afterlife of data—how immigration records, censuses, or military footage embed structural violence into bureaucratic memory. Their work testifies to how data is never “raw”: it is collected through regimes of power, and it carries that violence forward. These artists reanimate what official systems erase, constructing counter-archives that expose the silences, absences, and structural forgettings built into systems of documentation. This resonates deeply with the immigrant condition, in which legal presence is provisional and recognition is always deferred.
As archival artists uncover the hidden violences embedded in bureaucratic memory, another group of practitioners turns to the physical and infrastructural dimensions of data governance. By making visible the often-invisible hardware and networks that sustain digital control, these artists reveal how power operates not only through data but through material systems—servers, cables, and code—that shape everyday life. This exposure challenges the myth of a seamless digital realm, reminding us that governance is grounded in tangible, contested spaces where decisions about inclusion and exclusion are enacted.
Where the logic of governance is increasingly immaterial—hidden in code, servers, and proprietary systems—some artists work to make the infrastructure visible. James Bridle, in exploring what he terms the “New Aesthetic,” captures the eerie, semi-visible zone where machine perception intersects with urban life and planetary surveillance. Ingrid Burrington’s maps and guides to internet infrastructure render tangible the cables, server farms, and chokepoints that quietly govern digital existence. These works push back against the naturalization of the digital by showing it as a system of decisions, exclusions, and material constraints.
The “Data Turn” can be understood as a continuation of intellectual movements that critically examine the production and mediation of knowledge, much like the “Literary Turn” of the late twentieth century. The Literary Turn foregrounded language and narrative as active forces shaping historical meaning and subjectivity, challenging claims to objective or transparent truth. Similarly, the Data Turn interrogates the rise of data and computational systems as new epistemic tools that do not merely represent social realities but construct and govern them. This shift compels historians to reconsider the archives, sources, and methodologies that underpin their work, recognizing that data is embedded within power relations and ideological frameworks. Both turns reveal the contingency of knowledge and demand critical attention to the infrastructures through which it is produced and deployed.
By revealing the physical infrastructure behind digital governance, artists highlight how power operates through material systems that govern access and control. This focus on the tangible complements artistic engagements with the symbolic and bureaucratic forms that mediate migration. Together, these practices expose how both infrastructure and imagery function as aesthetic regimes—tools that shape and enforce legal and political inclusion, while also offering sites for creative rupture and alternative narratives.
Even the forms that mediate migration—passport photos, visa documents, biometric scans—are aesthetic regimes. They precede legal recognition; they shape it. Artists like Bouchra Khalili, in works like The Mapping Journey Project, appropriate these documentary forms not to affirm their authority, but to rupture them. Her work stages alternative cartographies of movement—ones based not on state control, but on narrative, memory, and resistance. In such works, the migrant is not a risk profile, but a storyteller.
By transforming state documentation into acts of storytelling and resistance, artists reclaim the migrant’s agency from reductive systems of classification. This reimagining challenges the prevailing logic of legibility, opening space for more nuanced understandings of identity and belonging beyond the constraints of bureaucratic control.
Across these practices, art offers not just critique but proposition. It creates space for reimagining how we understand legibility, personhood, and the infrastructures that shape both. In contrast to the Data Turn’s promise of seamless optimization, these works embrace what is incomplete, contradictory, and opaque. They remind us that data is not destiny, and that what cannot be captured might still be what matters most.
Together, these artistic interventions reveal that data regimes are not neutral frameworks but deeply embedded with values and power. By embracing ambiguity and incompleteness, they challenge dominant narratives of control and certainty, opening new possibilities for understanding identity and presence beyond bureaucratic constraints.
For scholars working at the intersection of immigration, data, and liminality, this aesthetic terrain is not peripheral—it is central. Art shows us that the Data Turn is not merely technical; it is philosophical. It carries assumptions about what kinds of life count, what futures are permissible, and how uncertainty should be managed. Visual practices, especially those rooted in the experience of liminality, offer a different grammar of visibility—one attuned not to classification, but to ambiguity; not to risk, but to relation.
photo of me, by me, from an art exhibition of the surveillance state in Montrealthis was from a room that tracked me taking photos of it taking photos of me
Mavis Gallant’s 1947 article “Are They Canadians?” appeared just as the first Canadian Citizenship Act came into force. This legislation marked a formal break from British subjecthood and a symbolic assertion of national identity. Yet Gallant was quick to observe a core contradiction: while legal citizenship was conferred, its meaning—socially, culturally, and emotionally—remained undefined. She cited the case of 1,500 naturalized Yugoslavs who, despite investing in Canadian society, ultimately returned to Europe. “They obviously did not feel they belonged here,” she wrote. “There has never been an organized program to teach immigrants the English language, let alone the rudiments of citizenship.”
More than seventy-five years later, her critique remains salient. Canada’s evolving identity continues to be shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics—no longer by the British Empire, but increasingly in relation to the United States. In this context, questions about belonging, integration, and national cohesion are as urgent as ever.
Today’s policy frameworks emphasize inclusivity, multiculturalism, and respect for diversity. Yet public discourse often defaults to symbolic gestures rather than substantive engagement with the meaning of citizenship. This risks creating a gap between the formal acquisition of status and the lived experience of belonging—echoing Gallant’s concern.
Complicating the contemporary picture are Indigenous perspectives on identity, citizenship, and sovereignty. These views are foundational to Canada’s history and future but do not fit neatly into conventional narratives of integration. Policymaking in this area must avoid simplistic inclusion and instead recognize the distinctiveness and plurality of Indigenous nationhoods.
Unlike the assimilationist model historically favoured by the United States, Canada’s approach to citizenship remains more open-ended. This is a strength—but only if paired with deliberate policy supports. Citizenship cannot be treated as a one-time legal event. It must be understood as an ongoing, participatory process grounded in common principles: democratic values, linguistic and civic literacy, Indigenous rights, and the rule of law. These serve as flexible but firm guardrails for fostering a shared sense of purpose.
For policymakers, the challenge is clear: to invest in the infrastructures—educational, social, cultural—that make belonging possible. This means expanding access to civic education, supporting language acquisition, affirming Indigenous jurisdiction, and creating inclusive spaces for plural narratives. Citizenship, in this context, becomes not only a legal designation but a collective, continuous process—one that reflects a nation still defining itself.
The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series provides an essential window into the internal deliberations of American policymakers during moments of global crisis. Compiled by the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian, FRUS volumes contain declassified memos, transcripts, and cables that reveal in real time how U.S. officials assessed and responded to unfolding events. In the case of South Vietnam’s collapse in 1975, these documents offer an unfiltered look at the rapidly changing military situation, the breakdown of civil authority, and the early contours of a refugee crisis that would eventually reach Canadian shores. Drawing from these records, this article traces how the fall of Da Nang marked the beginning of the boat people migration—one of the most significant humanitarian movements of the late 20th century. These excerpts are from Collapse and Evacuation, February 26–July 22, 1975 - Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume X, Vietnam, January 1973–July 1975
By the spring of 1975, the Republic of Vietnam was in freefall. While the world would later fixate on the iconic images of helicopters lifting evacuees from rooftops in Saigon, the real beginning of the humanitarian crisis—and of the Vietnamese diaspora to countries like Canada—can be traced to earlier moments, particularly the collapse of Da Nang.
In March 1975, Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second-largest city and a key northern stronghold, descended into chaos. As one U.S. official noted in a high-level conversation, “the political situation now is radically different,” with Communist forces gaining ground and establishing what many viewed as a legitimate revolutionary government. Ambassador Martin tried to argue that Da Nang might still hold or link to the south, but his view was challenged by others who insisted that the South Vietnamese forces were stretched too thin and facing imminent collapse.
This was not an overstatement. By late March, military analysts predicted Da Nang could fall “within a few days” due to overwhelming North Vietnamese pressure, disorganized South Vietnamese defenses, and mass civilian panic. One internal memo noted, “the situation in DaNang is chaotic,” and that “its defences could simply collapse”. President Thieu, then still in power, was reportedly considering pulling forces from the city entirely—a strategic retreat that left the civilian population vulnerable.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Gerald Ford and his advisors were receiving dire updates. CIA Director William Colby predicted that Da Nang would fall even if elite Marine units remained in place. “It should fall within two weeks,” he said, “even if the Marine Division stays”. When asked about the evacuation of civilians, Colby described “terrible mob scenes” at both airports and ports, where thousands tried to flee. Soldiers were firing their way onto ships. Law and order had broken down entirely.
What emerged in Da Nang was not just a tactical withdrawal or a city lost—it was the collapse of an entire civic order under the weight of war. The distinction between military personnel and civilians dissolved as desperation overtook discipline. Refugees overwhelmed the last remaining points of escape, creating a humanitarian crisis that left even U.S. officials stunned by its speed and scale. These early signals from Da Nang, echoed in classified briefings and policy cables, began to shape how allied governments would later understand their responsibilities—not just in geopolitical terms, but as urgent moral imperatives. In Canada, although formal resettlement programs were still years away, these early images and reports laid the groundwork for a new kind of foreign policy conversation: one that placed refugee protection at the heart of international engagement. The seeds of Canada’s eventual leadership in refugee resettlement were sown here—in the failure to protect, and the dawning realization that the world would soon be asked to respond.
This was more than a military failure. It marked the first wave of what would become a global humanitarian emergency. The fall of Da Nang was the beginning of a refugee crisis that would swell into the exodus of the thuyền nhân—the boat people—fleeing Vietnam by sea. Canada’s eventual involvement in resettling these refugees has become one of its most important modern migration stories, but the roots of that response lie in the scenes of terror and flight that emerged in places like Da Nang weeks before Saigon itself fell.
What distinguished the collapse in Da Nang was not just the loss of territory, but the unraveling of social and institutional fabric in real time. Unlike the images of orderly withdrawal sometimes projected in official narratives, the reality on the ground—documented in these U.S. diplomatic cables—was of disintegrating command structures, mass panic, and a population abandoned by any sense of coordinated response. It was in these moments that survival became individualized. Families fractured at airfields, children were separated from parents, and decisions were made with no time, no plan, and no guarantee of safety. The trauma of that sudden collapse carried forward into the boats, camps, and eventual resettlement pathways that followed.
The stories of those who would later arrive on Canadian shores—traumatized, stateless, and often separated from loved ones—began in these early, chaotic weeks. While many Canadians remember the arrival of the boat people in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the seeds of that journey were planted in the final weeks of the Vietnam War, when the international community was still struggling to comprehend the scale of what was to come.
For Canada, the fall of Da Nang and the refugee flight that followed posed both a moral and logistical question: how would the country respond to a new, mobile, and vulnerable population created by geopolitical collapse? The answer, forged in policy rooms and across civil society, would help redefine Canada’s refugee policy and multicultural identity in the decades to follow.
The 65-person polyurethane sculpture “La Foule Illuminée” (“The Illuminated Crowd”). Sculpted by Franco-British artist Raymond Mason, this public art has stood in front of the BNP/Laurentian Bank Tower since the mid-1980s. In the words of the artist: “A crowd has gathered, facing a light, an illumination brought about by a fire, an event, an ideology—or an ideal. The strong light casts shadows, and as the light moves toward the back and diminishes, the mood degenerates; rowdiness, disorder and violence occur, showing the fragile nature of man. Illumination, hope, involvement, hilarity, irritation, fear, illness, violence, murder and death—the flow of man’s emotion through space.”
I recently attended a poignant event at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montréal, which marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War—an inflection point that remains significant not only in global geopolitics but also in the history of immigration and identity in Canada. The event brought together a multigenerational audience: members of Montréal’s Vietnamese community, refugees who arrived in the wake of the war, scholars, academics, students, local dignitaries, and members of the Canadian Immigration Historical Society (CIHS). Held within one of the city’s foremost institutions for cultural memory, the gathering underscored the enduring importance of remembrance as both a personal and collective act.
The evening unfolded with intention—not as a commemorative, nationalist exercise, nor as nostalgia, but as a reflective gathering that captured the layered experiences of individuals and communities shaped by war and displacement. The atmosphere was thoughtful, yet vibrant with the presence of those who shared histories of resilience and survival. As the evening drew to a close, a panel discussion offered rich, nuanced perspectives on the intersections of personal history, trauma, and the formation of diasporic identity in Canada. Particularly moving was the presence of those who had lived through the unfolding of these events, a reminder of the importance of documenting immigration stories with care—not merely as historical record, but as acts of recognition and understanding.
The evening began with a generous spread of food, rich in both flavour and significance, setting a tone of warmth and hospitality. Members of the Vietnamese community, alongside politicians and dignitaries, gathered in solidarity, creating a space where shared histories could be acknowledged and celebrated.
Live traditional Vietnamese music filled the space, weaving an elegiac thread through the evening that linked memory to continuity and grief to cultural expression. The music underscored the solemn yet celebratory tone of the event, honouring the community’s resilience and strength in the face of hardship.
A documentary, featuring archival CBC footage and interviews with Canadian immigration officials and survivors, provided crucial historical context. The film offered a sobering glimpse into the bureaucratic and public discourse surrounding Canada’s response to the refugee crisis, juxtaposed with the human stories of loss and dislocation. One particularly poignant segment included a photograph of a young Michael Molloy, taken during his work as an Immigration Officer on the ground fifty years ago, serving as a powerful emblem of Canada’s evolving humanitarian identity during this pivotal period in immigration history.
Equally resonant was a short animated film created by a young Canadian filmmaker—the grandchild of a migrant who fled Vietnam. Drawing from their family’s experience, the film used stark symbolism and visual metaphor to convey the dislocations, terrors, and silences that followed the fall of Saigon. Haunting in its honesty, the animation offered an unflinching portrayal of state violence, resilience, and the quiet determination to rebuild. The poetic nature of the film transformed the unspeakable into something both shareable and sacred, ensuring that the memory of the tragedy would be preserved and passed on to future generations.
As a Canadian historian that studies liminal and boundary spaces defined through data, the event reinforced something fundamental to our collective identity: the quiet yet profound efforts of public servants and community leaders who, often unseen, shape the arc of memory and history. In many ways, the evening was a living archive—a convergence of memory and the moral duty to bear witness. The presence of those who fled war, alongside those born into the legacy of exile, reminded all in attendance that history is not defined by treaties or agreements or data alone. It is carried forward in the everyday acts of preservation: through photographs, music, stories passed down, and gatherings like this one, where the past is not merely remembered but consciously reassembled into a shared Canadian narrative.
