Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter further develops a relational understanding of classicality by examining contemporary engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity in refugee writing. It focuses on the works of Linda Lê and Ocean Vuong, two Vietnamese refugee writers who settled in different neoimperial centers, France and the United States, and who draw on classical texts to contest dominant narratives about refugees. Drawing on Critical Refugee Studies, the chapter introduces the concept of refugee classicism, a way of working with the classical that foregrounds refugee livability by refusing stable meanings and bounded frameworks, instead mobilizing classicality to imagine forms of movement, relation, and transformation. The first section analyzes how both authors position themselves in tension with the classical tradition in order to destabilize racialized classifications and to assert their authority as creators of myth rather than objects of myth. The second section turns to close readings of Lê’s Les Trois Parques and selected poems from Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds, examining how classical allusions are reworked to challenge the figure of the “good refugee.” Lê’s reimagining of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is shown to foreground loss, exile, and fractured subjectivity, while Vuong’s queering of the Homeric Odyssey disidentifies with inherited narratives of lineage and militarized masculinity. The chapter argues that both writers treat classical works as living materials within a broader “refugee repertoire,” using them to refuse essentialism and to articulate forms of “refugeetude” that unsettle cultural, racial, and intellectual hierarchies.</jats:p>