Kong Pheng Pha

State-less Visions: Hmong History, Memory, Photography

State-less Visions explores how invisibility, secrecy, and statelessness shaped Hmong representation through photography from the early 20th century to the present. The book demonstrates how Hmong, as a historically stateless and refugee population cracked through structures of invisibility and secrecy to become visible within specific moments in history. It asks: How do Hmong who have been rendered invisible through colonialism, imperialism, war, displacement, and racism reclaim their visibility? What forms of visibility produce further violence, and what forms enable empowerment and justice? How do Hmong make their political experiences visible to the world, and to each other?

Kong Pheng Pha is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research, public scholarship, and creative activities focus on Hmong history and politics; war and U.S. empire; critical refugee studies; Asian American communities in the Midwest; Asian American education; and feminist and queer social movements in the U.S. He is the author of Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (University of Washington Press, 2025). His research and writings have been published in the Hmong Studies Journal, Minnesota History, Amerasia Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, AMSJ: American Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, AGITATE!, Race Ethnicity and Education, and Journal of Transnational American Studies. His public scholarship have been published in Aperture Magazine, Leader-Telegram, Reappropriate, Twin Cities Daily Planet, and Hmong Today.