In the post-World War II era, refugees occupy principal roles in a tragically all-too-familiar before/after narrative of state-authorized persecution and subsequent statelessness. Within a Cold War US context, the term refugee encapsulates the legacies of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, militarized incursions into the Dominican Republic and the collateral failures of the Vietnam War. This latter conflict, unambiguously responsible for the largest influx of Southeast Asians into the United States, foregrounds this chapter's historicized focus on refugee cultural production, particularly with regard to the relatively recent emergence of Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong American literature. While Vietnamese American writing remains the most prominent “displacement literature” within the mainstream US literary marketplace, other Southeast Asian American refugee memoirs and elegies about the war—along with its legacies—have flourished in the last two decades of the twentieth century.