Refugee Camps in America, 1975-1982, and beyond?

Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Social Sciences cordially invite you to at talk with Jana K. Lipman on refugee camps in America. The talk takes place in room 215 at Hollar on 1 June from 3 p.m.

In 1975, the United States established refugee camps on several military bases in the aftermath of the U.S. War in Vietnam. In 1980, the U.S. again turned to military bases to house Cubans during the Mariel Boatlift. These camps raised questions about the relationship between humanitarianism and protection, on the one hand, and militarism and detention, on the other. Moreover, refugees on the bases were far from passive. They maneuvered for resettlement, protested, engaged in hunger strikes, and sought legal allies in the United States. This talk will consider U.S. refugee camps in Guam, Arkansas, and southern Florida in the 1970s and early 1980s, raising questions about detention and the limits of U.S. refugee and asylum policy today.

Jana K. Lipman is Professor of History at Tulane University. She is the author of Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (University of California Press, 2009), and her new book is In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum-Seekers, and Repatriates (University of California Press, 2020). She is currently the Fulbright-Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, Visiting Professor of International Studies.

The talk is organized as part of a series of invited lectures on the history and presence of refugees. The series aims to give more hue and substance, facts and methodology to the Czech scholarly and popular discussion about refugees and migration. It is jointly organized by the ERC-funded Unlikely refuge? project at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University.