









































O
“On Exile” or “Hope Without Optimism”

We stand on an edge 
Uncertain how we arrived here  
On one side: denigration, despair, destruction  
On the other: an abyss. 

 
Arising from the abyss 
Persistent piercing noise –  
a cacophony of promises:  
refuge, 
a temporary place to rest, 
a scornful unwelcome, 
violence disguised as benevolence. 

 
And Silence that envelopes –  
not the peaceful kind,  
the unsettling kind: 
ambivalent,  
uncertain,  
without guarantees.

 
On the edge - 
our choices are only ever risk 
On the edge - 
there is hope without optimism.

Author
thu sƯƠng thỊnguyỄn, Guest Editor

N G U Y Ễ N  |  O N  E X I L E

 
Tragic hope at the cruel edge: Toward an appreciation of 
the everyday struggles of the displaced2

Surrounded by deep dark waters – teetering on an edge 
in the South China Sea in a not-quite-sea-worthy fishing 
boat – my parents looked back toward a homeland on 
fire. Decades of war preceded that moment. Decades of 
exile followed. That war – long since ended – is still ever 
present.

All those years ago, my parents saw their world set on 
fire. Many might now suggest that the world is on fire. Set 
ablaze by violent conflict, intolerance and hate, shameful 
inequities, economic polarization and precarity, obscene 
consumption alongside extreme food insecurity, arrogant 
disregard and disrespect for the earth. Perhaps the kindling 
was the denuding of our moral resources and political will 
to gaze directly on the misery and destruction that we have 
wrought. 
 
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for 
Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that since 2021 more than 
100 million individuals have been forced to flee their 
homes—which is likely a gross underestimate. Across 
the globe, this figure represents 1 in every 78 individuals. 
Of these, more than 40% are children. The professional 
and scholarly literature focused on refugees, migrants, 
asylees, stateless and displaced peoples tends to center 

ENGAGE!  |  e xo d u s  &  e n t ry 4

1 I want to acknowledge that I borrow Terry Eagleton’s book title here and draw from his work on hope without optimism.

2 I want to acknowledge my spouse and colleague, Brendan Maxcy. Our partnership—together feeling out and working the edges, cruel  
and otherwise—enlivens my intellectual life and fortifies my spirit.

Tragic hope at the cruel edge: Toward 
an appreciation of the everyday  
struggles of the displaced



N G U Y Ễ N  |  O N  E X I L E

psycho-social conditions of those who suffer displacement 
and multiple dislocations. It asks: whether and how they 
are able to integrate into new “host communities;” whether 
return to their countries of origin is possible; what are the 
social, psychological, and health implications of protracted 
refugee status; etc. Far less attention is given to the ways 
these individuals and communities are treated as objects of 
containment within a human management project designed 
to administer global movement. 
 
Dr. Mamadou Sy’s allusion to the politically expedient 
treatment of those who experience the same conditions 
of displacement as alternately “refugee” and “migrant” 
(Sy interview, this issue) illustrates one way the human 
management project categorizes and contains “human 
objects” in order to efficiently manage flows of people and 
allocate meager resources. As Dr. Sy points out, certain 
aspects of this technical management of human flows 
typically receives bipartisan support. Moreover, media 
headlines suggest that even in the face of anti-sanctuary 
and anti-immigration efforts, individuals, communities, 
philanthropic and faith-based organizations, will pull 
together to welcome and assist refugees. What is obscured 
by such bipartisan support and popular human interest 
stories are the political and moral conditions that make 
it possible for us to look past the ways we’ve produced, 
multiplied, and populated the cruel edges of our social and 
material worlds. 
 
In 2021, of the 90 million individuals who experienced 
forced displacement, 27.1 million were given the label 
“refugee” (UNHCR). Some 15,000 were resettled in the 
United States. The articles included in this issue of EN-
GAGE! provide windows into particular moments of exile. 
The pieces focus our attention on those who were allowed 
to resettle. They encourage us to move beyond technical 
knowledge and demand that we rehabilitate our atrophied 
empathy. They remind us of the persistent, severe, and 

compromised health conditions of those who have suffered 
protracted displacement, physical violence, oppression, 
exclusion, dislocation, and alienation. They point to social, 
historical, cultural, and political complexities that are often 
ignored in our rush to provide well-intended palliatives. 
They illuminate how our conventional and over-gen-
eralized framing of “problems” may interfere with the 
“intentional engagement” (Morse, this issue) of the diverse 
communities we hope to serve (Kameniar, et al, 2010). 
 
Tu’s personal essay highlights the complexities, contra-
dictions, and unsettling conditions shaped by a legacy of 
imperialism and exile. These reverberate across genera-
tions and oceans and between a mother and daughter. Her 
essay demands that we read and sense the fragmentation of 
experience and anxious meaning-making born of divergent 
and haunted desires. In what may be viewed as a super-
ficial endeavor – pageantry – Tu’s account points to how 
pregnant with meaning are the practices and attendant 
labor for her, her mother, their communities. It provides a 
needed window on and a call for empathy after the imme-
diate threat of violence and expulsion. 

The condition of displacement is increasingly common. It 
will no doubt touch all of our lives as the global tem-
perature and sea levels rise and as shores recede, as the 
strength and frequency of natural disasters increases, as 
violence continues unabated. Of what he called a “general-
ized condition of homelessness,” Salman Rushdie wrote: 
 
 The effect of mass migration has been the cre 
 ation  of radically new types of human being:  
 people who root themselves in ideas rather than  
 place, in memories as much as in material things;  
 people who have been obliged to define them 
 selves – because they are so defined by others –  
 by their otherness; people in whose deepest  
 selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented  

5 VO L .  4 ,  I S S U E  2

3 Data collected by UNHCR are obtained through a few organizations that use movement tracking systems. These systems are not fully 
capable of handling the massive population flows we have seen in modern times. Thus, system capacity can be overwhelmed. Such 
tracking systems are also limited in their access to routes and locations in unstable areas. Individuals are many times disinclined to pro-
vide information for a variety of reasons (e.g., safety of self, loved ones, etc.). Agency reporting of human movement is subject to political 
pressures to suppress accurate information. 



 unions between what they were and  
  where they find themselves. 
 
If Rushdie is right, if radically new types of 
human being are created in the wake of mass 
displacement, then perhaps in this moment we 
will find the courage to look directly upon the 
world ablaze in deprivation and despair. Per-
haps in doing so we would recognize that the 
tens of millions of individuals currently “living” 
on the run, in temporary shelters, those who 
have spent years and even decades in organized 
refugee camps – even as they resist tyranny and 
oppression (Alwan, this issue) – are victims of a 
slow genocide. 
 
How do we engage this world on fire? Perhaps, 
we will finally discard impotent (and some-
times dangerous) optimism in favor of “tragic 
hope” (Eagleton, 2015). As Eagleton argues, 
the former is grounded in cheery irrational 
belief while the latter demands reflection and 
strenuous commitment in the wake of defeat 
and the recognition that there are still battles to 
be fought. Perhaps we have suffered enough 
tragedy to finally awaken from the fantasy 
that things will improve because it cannot be 
otherwise. 

As I ponder where to go from here, my parents 
occupy my thoughts. The weight of innumer-
able defeats experienced over and again as 
exiles and forever foreigners must have been 
near unbearable for them. My and my siblings’ 
younger selves – our inabilities to empathize, 
to fully resist incomplete and unkind narratives 
about our parents, to squelch our own petty 
desires – no doubt compounded their pain and 
littered the edge they traversed with thoughtless 
shards of glass. Memories of their dignified 
struggle and their struggle for dignity on behalf 
of their family—families—are suggestive of 
what constitutes tragic hope. Their daughter’s 

desires for their grandsons – Tâm Bình and 
Tâm Minh, my sunrise (bình minh) – to honor 
a legacy of living with dignity even as others 
who by dint of malice or benevolence would 
undermine that dignity, too illuminates the 
political clarity and cultural humility (Horton & 
Freire, 1990) required to recognize and engage 
the cruel edges. 
 
For those working in and with communities 
that have long embodied and operated from 
spaces of tragic hope, I want to center different 
questions. Who constitutes “our” communities? 
Under what conditions might our notions of 
community expand or contract? How do we 
understand our responsibilities to those who 
are forcibly displaced? In what ways might we 
have mistaken infantilization for responsibili-
ty? Is it possible to shake our captivation with 
the horrors of the strife and its casualties that 
occludes the “dignified,” quotidian, and neces-
sary struggles that follow? In what ways does 
the allure of the spectacle shape our treatment 
of Others? Might we engage differently if we 
understood those at the edge as operating with 
agency, humanity, and dignity rather than as an 
enfeebled mass pushed to and over the edge? 
 
 
 
 
Eagleton, T. (2015). Hope without optimism. 
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Horton, M. & Freire, P. (1990). We make the 
road by walking: Conversations on education 
and social change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple 
University Press. 

Kameniar, B. M., Imtoual, A., & Bradley, D. 
(2010). “Mullin’ the Yarndi” and other wick-
ed problems at a multiracial early childhood 
education site in regional Australia. Educational 
Policy, 24(1), 9-27.

Designer
nick asbell 
IUPUI 

Office of 
community  
engagement staff
liz m. terry 
IUPUI
 

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

6

Online journal 
development
ted polley 
IUPUI 
 

Associate editors
william b. crow 
Lehigh University

carolyn gentle-genitty 
Indiana University

jim grim 
IUPUI

rita hodges 
University of Pennsylvania

natasha howard 
Morehouse College

terri jett 
Butler University

brendan maxcy 
IUPUI

mary price 
Forum on Education Abroad

carol rogers 
IUPUI

javiette vashan samuel 
Univeristy of Tennessee, 
Knoxville

sarah stanlick 
Worcester Polytechnic 
Institute

ellen szarleta 
IU, Northwest

laura weaver 
Community-Engaged Alliance

Editors
khaula murtada 
IUPUI 

andrea copeland 
IUPUI

References




