{"id":185399,"date":"2017-02-10T14:54:29","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T19:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=185399"},"modified":"2022-05-04T14:58:43","modified_gmt":"2022-05-04T18:58:43","slug":"resisting-the-wheels-of-history-rupture-and-remembrance-in-cambodian-american-memory-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2017\/02\/resisting-the-wheels-of-history-rupture-and-remembrance-in-cambodian-american-memory-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Resisting The “Wheels of History” – Rupture and Remembrance in Cambodian American Memory Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

GIVEN:<\/strong> 20 million refugees<\/p>\n

GIVEN:<\/strong> individuals who return home are not the same people they were when they left<\/p>\n

GIVEN:<\/strong> nearly every single family in Cambodia suffered losses during the time of the Khmer Rouge<\/p>\n

PROVE:<\/strong> the journey never ends for the refugee<\/p>\n

PROVE:<\/strong> survivors must learn to live with the absence of 2 million<\/p>\n

PROVE:<\/strong> it is absence that propels the living to remember<\/p>\n

“I will return to a country I have never known \/ that burns a hole inside my heart the size of home \/ when I arrive, \/ will I recognize Loss if she came to greet me at the airport \/ will she help me with my bags \/ usher me through customs \/ will she take me to my birth village \/ point me to the graves of ancestors \/ will she share silence with me \/ will she embrace me \/ will I ask these same questions \/ or will I be asked to prove my belonging\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026I often think about our leaving and all we left behind \/ imagined our lives without this exodus \/ dreamt of days when I could speak to Loss \/ to tell her we didn\u2019t choose to leave \/ leaving chose us.”<\/em> \u2013 Anida Yoeu Ali, “Visiting Loss,” 2005. 2<\/sup><\/p>\n

The Khmer Rouge reign of terror began at approximately 7:30 a.m. on April 17, 1975, when black-uniformed soldiers marched into the nation\u2019s capital (Phnom Penh) during the Cambodian New Year.3<\/sup> Emboldened by American foreign policy disasters and an unpopular Lon Nol dictatorship, the authoritarian regime found little resistance from Cambodians wary of illegal bombings, chaotic civil war, and ceaseless military violence.4<\/sup> Grounded in untenable agricultural revolution, determined to eradicate Western influence by any means necessary, the Khmer Rouge systematically evacuated Cambodia\u2019s cities and forcibly relocated residents to countryside labor camps. Single-minded in its \u201cyear zero\u201d focus\u2014which ironically hearkened back to analogous \u201cyear one\u201d frames at work in France\u2019s 1793-1805 \u201cRevolutionary Calendar\u201d\u2014the Khmer Rouge renamed the former French colony \u201cDemocratic Kampuchea,\u201d tortured countless numbers of Cambodian citizens, and executed thousands of alleged \u201cenemies of the people.\u201d 5<\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Suggestive of inchoate place and subtractive time, the tabula rasa<\/em> nature of \u201cyear zero\u201d was most plain vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> \u201cthe wheel of history,\u201d a state-produced metaphor configured along a paradoxical, ahistorical axis of \u201cprogress.\u201d This de-historicized, state-authorized dictate was not limited to governmental slogans. The Khmer Rouge\u2019s \u201cwheel of history\u201d fulfilled its promise, crushing virtually all facets of pre-revolutionary Cambodian society.6<\/sup> The Khmer Rouge prohibited religion, outlawed education, disallowed currency, proscribed private property, and forbade the use of affective family names (e.g. for siblings, mothers, and fathers). As Ben Kiernan maintains, Democratic Kampuchea\u2019s \u201cslogan became kchat kchay os roling (\u2018scatter them to the last\u2019).\u201d Correspondingly, the Khmer Rouge \u201cscattered libraries, burned books, closed schools, and murdered schoolteachers.\u201d7<\/sup> Within this compulsorily forgetful milieu, Cambodia\u2019s National Library \u2013 the country\u2019s chief cultural repository \u2013 was emptied and converted into a pigsty.8<\/sup> In the months after Democratic Kampuchea\u2019s dissolution, journalist John Pilger reported that the Khmer Rouge banned the word \u201csleep,\u201d privileging instead less permanent allusions to \u201crest,\u201d a lexical move congruous with an overriding emphasis on extreme labor.9<\/sup><\/p>\n

Demanding that its citizens \u201cgive up all [their] personal belongings\u201d and \u201crenounce their father, their mother, all their family,\u201d the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge (a.k.a. Angka<\/em>, or \u201cthe organization\u201d) dismantled by way of totalitarian repudiation the principal pillars of Cambodian society: centuries-old tradition, pre-revolutionary socioeconomic infrastructures, and Khmer familial affiliation.10<\/sup>\u00a0Democratic Kampuchea\u2019s \u201cwheel of history\u201d had little need for those who could \u201cnot keep pace,\u201d including the sick, the starving, the weak, and the elderly. Nor did Angka<\/em> have use for teachers, lawyers, judges, civil servants, doctors, artists, returning Cambodian ex-patriots (who were fellow leftists), Cambodian Muslims (principally the Cham), Khmer Khrom (Cambodians living in South Vietnam), and ethnic Vietnamese Cambodians, who were specifically targeted, tortured, and executed. Between 1975 and 1979, over the course of three years, eight months, and twenty days, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians (21-25% of the extant population) due to execution, torture, starvation, overwork, and disease.<\/p>\n

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Unquestionably, this period\u2014known as the era of the Killing Fields<\/em> to those outside Cambodia and \u201cPol Pot Time\u201d for those within\u2014would have profound consequences long after the dissolution of the regime. Following Democratic Kampuchea\u2019s demise, approximately 65% of the population was female, highlighting the disproportionate number of Cambodian men killed during the regime. The majority of Cambodia\u2019s teachers (three-quarters) died or fled the country.11<\/sup> Equally catastrophic, by the time the Vietnamese ostensibly liberated Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, 90% of Khmer court musicians and dancers had been executed, nine judges were left in country, and out of an estimated 550 doctors, only forty-eight survived.12<\/sup> Faced with famine, lack of medicine, no infrastructure, and persistent political uncertainty, approximately 510,000 Cambodians fled to neighboring Thailand; 100,000 sought refuge in close-by Viet Nam.13<\/sup> Between 1980 and 1985, almost 150,000 Cambodians came to the United States, facilitated by the congressional passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, though others would eventually find asylum in France and Australia (among others).14<\/sup> To date, more than 230,000 individuals of Khmer descent live in the United States, making it home to the largest population of Cambodians living outside Cambodia in the world.15<\/sup><\/p>\n

Visiting Loss and Transnational Remembrance<\/b><\/h2>\n

The dramatic movement of Cambodian bodies across borders, camps, and asylum states\u2014born out of totalitarianism, genocide, and state unrest\u2014undeniably foregrounds self-described \u201cCambodian American Muslim transnational\u201d writer\/performer Anida Yoeu Ali\u2019s epic poem, \u201cVisiting Loss.\u201d Written thirty years after the disastrous birth of Democratic Kampuchea, Ali\u2019s eleven-stanza \u201cVisiting Loss\u201d is an elegiac poem centered on Ali\u2019s first-time return to Cambodia following a twenty-five year absence. Autobiographical, \u201cVisiting Loss\u201d employs a stream-of-consciousness narration (evident in enjambed lines and stanzas).16<\/sup> Notwithstanding the poem\u2019s \u201cjourneyed\u201d emphasis, \u201cVisiting Loss\u201d reproduces a transnational refugee subjectivity forged in the interstices of U.S. foreign policy, Cambodian genocide, Cambodian American remembrance and juridical activism.<\/p>\n

\u201cVisiting Loss\u201d begins with \u201c20 million refugees,\u201d an epigraphical allusion to the calamitous demographic aftershocks of the American war in Viet Nam (1964-1975). Incontrovertibly, the war was not\u2014even with Cold War policies of \u201ccontainment\u201d\u2014restricted to Viet Nam. Instead, as the contemporary presence of Southeast Asian refugees makes clear, America\u2019s mid-century war \u201cover there\u201d involved \u201cdirty war\u201d campaigns in Laos, was waged from military outposts and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stations in Thailand, encompassed covert missions in Burma, and\u2014most relevant to Ali\u2019s \u201cVisiting Loss\u201d\u2014included illegal bombings of Cambodia. Specifically, U.S. foreign policy took the undercover form of \u201cB-52 Menu bombings\u201d (1969-1973) that targeted alleged North Vietnamese communist sites along the \u201cHo Chi Minh Trail\u201d in the Cambodian countryside. These euphemistically-named campaigns dropped more than 540,000 tons of munitions (more than the tonnage used by the U.S. in World War II), killing an estimated 150,000 to 500,000 Cambodian military personnel and civilians.17<\/sup><\/p>\n

Antithetical to U.S. interests abroad, this illicit carpet-bombing operation actually increased support for the communist Khmer Rouge, who opportunistically promised an end to U.S. imperialism and conflict in the region. Worsening the nation\u2019s political situation (which previously took the form of unwavering Cambodian neutrality during the conflict), President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (soon-to-be an ironic recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973) installed vehement anti-communist General Lon Nol as its head of state in 1970, fomenting a five-year civil war.18<\/sup> With the assistance of superpower-driven realpolitik<\/em>, geopolitically inclusive of United States, the Soviet Union (which backed North Viet Nam) and China (the chief Khmer Rouge ally), Pol Pot\u2019s forces would triumphantly overtake the capital and the nation in 1975. Situated against a ruinous Cold War matrix, Ali\u2019s beginning statement of \u201c20 million refugees\u201d concisely gestures toward displaced subjectivities in the aftermath of war, totalitarianism, and relocation.<\/p>\n

Such non-bordered spaces and open-ended time frames are apparent in the poem\u2019s title, which uses a non-finite gerund (\u201cvisiting\u201d) modified by an ill-defined noun (\u201closs\u201d). This lack of grammatical definition is reinforced by Ali\u2019s recurring use of the interrogative \u201cwill I\u201d construction to reveal what the poet anticipates she will encounter upon her return to Cambodia (e.g. \u201cwill I recognize,\u201d \u201cwill I need to look deeper,\u201d and \u201cwill I be at a loss for words\u201d). Despite such \u201cunsettled\u201d language, Anida Yoeu Ali\u2019s \u201cVisiting Loss\u201d does<\/em> have an identifiable destination\u2014Cambodia\u2014and a legible (albeit incomplete) setting: post-Democratic Kampuchea. Indeed, the second stanza in \u201cVisiting Loss\u201d (also in the opening epigraph) begins with the poet\u2019s statement that she \u201cwill return to a country I have never known.\u201d19<\/sup> This future declarative is predicated on a refugee unfamiliarity born out of Ali\u2019s abrupt departure as a child. Even so, Ali highlights an emotional relationship to Cambodia, which emblematically \u201cburns a hole inside my heart the size of home.\u201d20<\/sup> This embodied metaphor \u2013 focused on the heart \u2013 reflects an interrogative structure that affectively attaches Cambodian refugee to personified \u201cLoss.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further, as a transnational returnee, no family members meet the artist\/poet at the airport, reinforcing the devastating and ongoing impact of a genocidal past. Instead, it is the feminized \u201cLoss,\u201d who\u2014like Cambodia\u2014is potentially unrecognizable, and who\u2014a la<\/em> Ali\u2014is born out of familial separation, cultural depravation, and state-authorized ruination. Ali substantiates this reading with mentions of \u201cbirth villages,\u201d ancestor graves, and \u201csilences,\u201d\u2014sites and emblems of war-time collateral damage. All in all, Ali cartographically reproduces\u2014by way of initial allusion\u2014a legible set of refugee coordinates which identifies and relates distinct points of U.S. foreign policy, modern Cambodian history, and contemporary Cambodian American survivor memory.<\/p>\n

In so doing, \u201cVisiting Loss\u201d adheres to what Kandice Chu maintains is the geopolitical function of \u201ctransnational\u201d as a \u201ccognitive analytic that traces the incapacity of the nation state to contain and represent fully the subjectivities and way of life that circulate within the nation-space.\u201d21<\/sup> In Ali\u2019s epic poem, this \u201ccognitive analytic\u201d traces the \u201cincapacity\u201d of a post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia and a present-day United States to \u201crepresent fully the subjectivities\u201d that circulate within the diasporic nation-space<\/em> (e.g. the refugee subject). For the \u201cCambodian American Muslim transnational\u201d Ali then, the unbounded histories and experiences which shape the refugee subject bespeak an involuntary circulation of bodies across borders in conflict with national narratives of exceptionalism and reconciliation. Within the context of a displaced Cambodian American subject, this \u201cincapacity\u201d must necessarily be evaluated vis-\u00e0-vis the pursuit of prosecution and justice following the dissolution of the Khmer Rouge regime, which is internationally and domestically marked by deliberate erasure, amnesia, and absence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Juridical Belatedness: Prosecuting the Khmer Rouge<\/b><\/h2>\n

Expressly, if reporter William Shawcross\u2019s evocative characterization of Cambodia as a \u201csideshow\u201d aptly encompassed mid-century U.S. foreign policy (wherein the nation was a collateral site in the \u201cmain stage\u201d Vietnam War), the term also encapsulates a still-unresolved Khmer Rouge trial history via war, torture, and genocide. Soon after the end of Democratic Kampuchea in 1979, the newly established People\u2019s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) began its juridical assault on the Khmer Rouge. To that end, the PRK government collected an estimated 995 pages of testimony from victims of the regime.22<\/sup>\u00a0These testimonies recounted abuses and human rights violations during the Democratic Kampuchean era, and this criminal investigation culminated in a four-day trial, in which the regime\u2019s leader (Saloth Sar a.k.a. Pol Pot) and Khmer Rouge\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister (Ieng Sary) were tried on grounds of genocide and sentenced \u2013 in absentia<\/em> \u2013 to death.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>In the face of such testimonial documentation, the PRK trial was by and large ignored by the international community. Indeed, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights refused to consider the prosecutorial evidence because the investigation and trial did not follow U.N. protocol. Superficially dismissed on administrative grounds, the unwillingness to prosecute former Khmer Rouge leaders reveals a problematic continuation of ongoing Khmer Rouge support and Cold War politics. Until the dissolution of the PRK, the U.N. officially recognized Khieu Samphan (a high ranking Khmer Rouge official) as Cambodia\u2019s head of state. Following the \u201cFall of Saigon,\u201d the United States continued an anti-Vietnamese foreign policy for the next ten years (1979 \u2013 1989), which took the form of aid and supplies to displaced Khmer Rouge leaders in Thailand. Another high-ranking player on the U.N. stage\u2014China\u2014had, as mentioned previously, supported the Khmer Rouge and was equally disposed to anti-Vietnam initiatives due to antagonist relations in the region.<\/p>\n

Domestically, justice proves just as obscured and elusive. Though Cambodia\u2019s political imaginary was in part stabilized following the end of the Vietnamese occupation (1989), U.N. intervention (1991-1993), and Prime Minister Hun Sen\u2019s coup (1998-1997), prosecuting Khmer Rouge perpetrators was not a priority until 2003, when the U.N. and Cambodia\u2019s government (led by former Khmer Rouge foot soldier and long-standing Prime Minister Hun Sen) began discussions about an international tribunal. An agreement with the United Nations was reached in June 2003 detailing how the international community would assist and participate in the hybrid tribunal, called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Seven years would pass until the ECCC (a.k.a. the UN\/Khmer Rouge Tribunal) would render its first conviction on July 26, 2010\u2014Kaing Eav Guek (a.k.a. Duch, the head warden of Cambodia\u2019s notorious S-21 prison, the fatal destination for more than 12,000 Cambodians) was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced (with time served) to nineteen years in prison.23<\/sup> Currently, a total of only two Khmer Rouge officials remain in custody: Nuon Chea (the regime\u2019s chief ideologue and \u201cBrother Number Two\u201d) and Khieu Samphan (the Khmer Rouge Head of State). The aforementioned Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith (democratic Kampuchea, Minister for Social Affairs) passed away and were released on grounds of mental instability respectively; Thirith would also die before the court was able to issue its second verdict of \u201cguilty\u201d to Chea and Samphan for crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n

<\/h2>\n

Cambodian American Memory Work <\/b><\/h2>\n

Thus, despite the passage of more than four decades since the regime\u2019s deposal, to date only three Khmer Rouge officials have successfully been tried, convicted, and sentenced for war crimes and crimes against humanity in an international court of law. Set against this post-Khmer Rouge juridical backdrop, Ali\u2019s \u201cremembrance work\u201d\u2014wherein Cambodians and Cambodian Americans \u201cmust learn to live with the absence of 2 million\u201d\u2014gestures toward a politicized mode of transnational memory. At the same time, Ali\u2019s \u201cVisiting Loss(focused on survivors and an \u201cabsence that propels the living to remember) dialectically calls to mind Walter Benjamin\u2019s Theses on the Philosophy of History<\/i> (1940), wherein the German Jewish philosopher avers, \u201cTo articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it \u2018the way it really was.\u2019 It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.\u201d 24<\/sup><\/p>\n

Written during a profound international crisis (revealed in the strengthened presence of fascism in Europe and on the world stage), Benjamin\u2019s consideration of history militates against an allegedly \u201cprogressive\u201d and complicit uses of the past. Necessarily, Theses on the Philosophy of History <\/em>combats \u201cpoliticians\u2019 stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their \u2018mass basis,\u2019 and\u2026their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus.\u201d25<\/sup> Such \u201cmass basis,\u201d or conformism, relies on a reading of history as a \u201cprogression through homogenous empty time\u201d which fails to address the primacy of the present in the production of state narratives. Further, this \u201chomogenous, empty time\u201d\u2014redolent of static, vacant frames\u2014underscores teleological assertions of inevitability and foregrounds exclusionary, disastrous readings of progress (contemporaneously redolent ofHitler\u2019s \u201cFinal Solution\u201d and presciently apt for Pol Pot\u2019s \u201cWheel of History\u201d).<\/a><\/p>\n

By collapsing verbalization, expression, recognition, and remembrance amid a catastrophic totalitarian crisis, Benjamin\u2019s \u201chistory thesis\u201d engenders alternative, non-state-sanctioned routes to the past. These historical transits are composed of \u201cdangerous moments\u201d and eruptive \u201cmemory flashes\u201d that carry the potential to destabilize national narratives of cohesion and amnesic uniformity. Correspondingly, Benjamin rejects teleology and supplements the primacy of concrete historical facts (e.g. dates, leaders, and battles) with intangible but by no means less valid modes of seized <\/em>remembrance. Concurrently, these seizures \u2013 reminiscent of force, rupture, and containment\u2014become opportunities of recovery that evocatively collapse the boundary between history and memory. Therefore, Benjamin\u2019s cacophonous, disruptive reading of historicity naturalizes individual and communal memory by means of inclusion, assimilating such remembrances to fit a more expansive articulation of the past.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Indeed, Benjamin codifies the principal parameters through which to construct a contrapuntal archive that challenges strategic, nationally-serving amnesias. Arguing that a \u201credeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments,\u201d the philosopher elaborates, \u201cFor every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.\u201d26<\/sup>This historical labor \u2013 which embodies a syncretic understanding of the past and <\/em>present \u2013 accretes political significance when placed perpendicular to dominant narratives of the past. Such antithetical placement further revises an official vector which indubitably privileges above mentioned exclusive stories of \u201cprogress\u201d and state-authorized tales of singularity and exceptionalism. Likewise, Benjamin\u2019s historical reading re-inscribes the primacy of the \u201coppressed\u201d in the production of a new historical archive.<\/p>\n

Correspondingly, Benjamin notes, \u201cthe tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the \u2018state of emergency\u2019 in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight\u201d (257).27\u00a0<\/sup>By forging a political connection between the \u201cway it really was\u201d and the \u201cway it was remembered,\u201d Benjamin undermines nation-state claims and political arguments of teleological uniqueness, engendering a multivalent historicity constitutive of counter-hegemonic, remembrance-oriented resistance. In the end, Theses on the Philosophy of History<\/em> significantly positions the oppressed as resistive agents of memory.\u00a0 In turn, such agents have the potential to produce a \u201ccitable\u201d archive constructed according to episodic yet nonetheless significant memory moments. Lastly, the collection and production of this archive makes possible an alternative to state-sanctioned memories employed to exclude, disenfranchise, and forget.<\/p>\n

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Benjamin\u2019s history thesis \u2013 which fuses resistance to memory, agency, and archive \u2013 highlights what is at once theoretically at stake in Anida Yoeu Ali\u2019s \u201cVisiting Loss,\u201d which epitomizes the work of Cambodian American writers and artists who, through individual and familial narratives of survival and loss, memorialize the period of the Killing Fields, articulate, through the revelation and negotiation of trauma, calls for justice, and negotiate the complicated question of reconciliation. In the process, Cambodian American cultural producers are engaged in a form of archival labor which visits, through multiple idioms, loss. <\/em>Such production militates against Khmer Rouge \u201cyear zero\u201d frames, recuperates pre-revolutionary traditions, accesses survivor testimonials, and carries an incontrovertible evidentiary function. As Teri Shaffer Yamada argues, artists like Ali \u201cresituate the Cambodian American [subject] from silenced position of victim to the site of social justice advocate: the personally and politically significant movement from victim to plaintiff\u201d (159). Engaged in politicized acts of resistance, individually produced and communally consumed, reflective of both U.S. and Cambodian aesthetics, Cambodian American cultural production is, to use Lisa Lowe\u2019s oft-quoted characterization of Asian America, marked by a heretofore under-examined heterogeneity, multiplicity, and hybridity.<\/p>\n

In closing, Cambodian American artists and writers purposefully and politically use remembrance to deconstruct, reconstruct, and reimagine the affective dimensions of history and nation. Such work, which assumes what Lisa Yoneyama characterizes as a \u201cBenjaminian dialectics of memory,\u201d necessarily \u201callows historical knowledge to remain critically germane to present struggles for social change\u201d by way of interrupting \u201cthe evolutionary continuity between past and present.\u201d It is the political, communal, and juridical foci of such memory-oriented labor \u2013 which is shaped by multiple moments of rupture and the failure of nation-state to facilitate large-scale reconciliation \u2013 that undergirds the explorations of Cambodian American cultural production which comprise my emblematic second monograph, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). As this project maintains, Cambodian American writers and artists engage \u2013 through poetry, performance, memoir, film, and hip hop \u2013 an identifiable form of \u201cmemory work,\u201d which links calls for justice and acts of resistance to genocide remembrance. Drawing on what James Young labeled \u201cmemory work\u201d with regard to the collective articulation of large-scale human loss in Holocaust memorialization debates, such producers mediate the unresolved question of justice through multivalent frames of public remembrance. In sum, Cambodian American cultural producers time and again negotiate historic and presentist cartographies of state-authorized violence (from the Cold War to the War on Terror) via the strategic imagination of alternative sites for memorialization, remembrance, reclamation, and justice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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1<\/sup>\u00a0See Locard, Henri. Pol Pot\u2019s Little Red Book:\u00a0 The Sayings of Angkar<\/em> (Chiang Mai, Thailand:\u00a0 Silkworm Books, 2004). p.\u00a0 213.<\/p>\n

2<\/sup>\u00a0See Ali, Anida Yoeu. 2005. \u201cVisiting Loss.\u201d <http:\/\/atomicshogun.com\/writing_visitingloss.htm><\/p>\n

3<\/sup>\u00a0See Munro, David I. (dir).Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia<\/em>. John Pilger (narrator). London: ATV Network Limited, 1979.<\/p>\n

4<\/sup>\u00a0Both the Nixon administration and the Ford administration supported (financially and politically) the Lon Nol government, which was vociferously anti-communist. This support was part of a more expansive Vietnam War strategy that sought \u2013 at all costs \u2013 to eliminate communist influence in the region. Between 1969-1973, the United States orchestrated covert bombings of the Cambodian countryside under the largely unproven assumption that Viet Cong were headquartered in the area. According to Ben Kiernan, by 1973, \u201chalf a million tons of U.S. bombs had killed over 100,000 peasants and devastated the countryside\u201d (78). The amount of munitions tonnage was the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombings. See Kiernan, Ben. \u201cRecovering History and Justice in Cambodia.\u201dComparativ 14<\/em> (2004), Heft 5\/6, S. p. 78.<\/p>\n

5<\/sup>\u00a0The term, \u201cEnemies of the People,\u201d comes from a speech delivered by Pol Pot that aired in 1977 warning his fellow Democratic Kampucheans that there were potential traitors in their midst.\u00a0 This is also the title of the recently released documentary film directed by Rob Lemkin and Sambath Thet (2010). It should be noted that Cambodia was officially renamed \u201cDemocratic Kampuchea\u201d as per the adoption of a Khmer Rouge constitution January 5, 1976.<\/p>\n

6<\/sup>\u00a0The term, \u201cgenocide,\u201d is contested vis-\u00e0-vis the Khmer Rouge.\u00a0 Some have argued that what happened in Cambodia constituted an \u201cautogenocide\u201d because \u2013 unlike other genocides \u2013 no one group was targeted.\u00a0 Ben Kiernan and others have argued against this reading, pointing to the Cham and the Khmer Khrom. Given that Cambodian American cultural producers by and large refer to this era as a period of genocide, I have followed suit with terminology.<\/p>\n

7\u00a0<\/sup>See Kiernan, Ben. \u201cRecovering History and Justice in Cambodia.\u201dComparativ 14<\/em> (2004), Heft 5\/6, S. p. 80.<\/p>\n

8<\/sup>\u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n

9<\/sup>\u00a0See Munro, David I. (dir).Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia<\/em>n . John Pilger (narrator). London: ATV Network Limited, 1979.<\/p>\n

10<\/sup> See Locard, Henri. Pol Pot\u2019s Little Red Book:\u00a0 The Sayings of Angkar<\/em> (Chiang Mai, Thailand:\u00a0 Silkworm Books, 2004). p. 269. Also, Pol Pot was the nom de guerre <\/em>for Saloth Sar,<\/p>\n

11<\/sup>\u00a0See Kiernan, Ben. \u201cRecovering History and Justice in Cambodia.\u201dComparativ 14<\/em> (2004), Heft 5\/6, S. p. 80.<\/p>\n

12<\/sup>\u00a0See Munro, David I. (dir).Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia<\/em>n . John Pilger (narrator). London: ATV Network Limited, 1979.<\/p>\n

13<\/sup>\u00a0See Southeast Asian Resource Center (SEARAC), \u201cCambodian Refugees.\u201d <http:\/\/www.searac.org\/cambref.html> accessed June 12, 2010.<\/p>\n

14<\/sup>\u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n

15<\/sup>\u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n

16<\/sup> See Ali, Anida Yoeu. 2005. \u201cVisiting Loss.\u201d<http:\/\/atomicshogun.com\/writing_visitingloss.htm><\/p>\n

17\u00a0<\/sup>Cambodia:\u00a0 Pol Pot\u2019s Shadow<\/em>. (<http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/frontlineworld\/stories\/cambodia\/tl02.html<\/em>\u00a0 Accessed 12 July 2008>). As many scholars within the field of Cambodian Studies have observed, more bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this time than the amount used against Japan in the Second World War.\u00a0 According to David Chandler, \u201cIn the first half of 1973 the United States brutally postponed a Communist victory by conducting a bombing campaign of Cambodia that, in its intensity, was as far-reaching as any during World War II.\u00a0 Over a hundred thousand tons of bombs fell on the Cambodian countryside before the U.S. Congress prohibited further bombing.\u201d See Chandler, David. A History of Cambodia<\/em>. (third edition). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. p. 252.<\/p>\n

18<\/sup>\u00a0Henry Kissinger was, along with revolutionary North Vietnamese politician\/diplomat Le Duc Tho, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their collaborative work on the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which ostensibly orchestrated a cease-fire agreement in the Vietnam War. Tho had refused to accept the award; Kissinger accepted. Interestingly, Tho would serve as the chief advisor to the People\u2019s Republic of Kampuchea (1978 \u2013 1982), and was charged with protecting Vietnamese interests during the occupation.<\/p>\n

19<\/sup>\u00a0See Ali, Anida Yoeu. 2005. \u201cVisiting Loss.\u201d<http:\/\/atomicshogun.com\/writing_visitingloss.htm><\/p>\n

20<\/sup>\u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n

21<\/sup>\u00a0See Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian American Critique<\/em>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. p. 62.<\/p>\n

22<\/sup>\u00a0See Raoul-Marc Jennar. \u201cCambodia:\u00a0 Khmer Rouge in Court.\u201d Le Monde Diplomatique <\/em>[English Version]. October 2006. <http:\/\/mondediplo.com\/2006\/10\/11cambodia><\/p>\n

23<\/sup>\u00a0Although Kaing Guek Eav (Duch) was indicted on August 12, 2008 for crimes against humanity for his role in the administration of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison (S-21), a place where an estimated 14,000 to 16,000 individuals were tortured and executed for alleged activities against the Democratic Kampuchean regime, the trial officially began February 17, 2009.\u00a0 According to Associated Press reporter Ker Munthit, an estimated 14 individuals survived their imprisonment at S-21. See \u201cCambodian Tribunal Indicts Khmer Rouge Jailer.\u201d The Washington Times<\/em>, 12 April 2008. <http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/news\/2008\/aug\/12\/cambodian-tribunal-indicts-khmer-rouge-jailer-1\/<\/em>> (13 April 2008).<\/p>\n

24<\/sup>\u00a0See Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections<\/em>. Hannah Arendt (editor). London, Schoken: 1969. p. 255. In the original quote, Benjamin cites Leopold von Ranke, a prominent German historian who rejected Hegel\u2019s notion of historical materialism in favor of a source-based historicism. Lisa Lowe, in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996) also draws on this particular quote (97), as does Lisa Yoneyama in the introduction to Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory<\/em>. Lowe uses Benjamin\u2019s compression of time and space to examine Asian American cultural production via \u201cdecolonization, displacement, and disidentification.\u201d Each work is instructive with regard to applications of Benjamin\u2019s work within spaces of trauma and subjugation. I diverge from Lowe and Yoneyama by using Benjamin\u2019s work as a foundation upon which to examine the types of labor enacted by remembrance (memory work).<\/p>\n

25\u00a0<\/sup>Ibid., p. 258.<\/p>\n

26\u00a0<\/sup>Ibid., p. 255.<\/p>\n

27<\/sup>\u00a0Benjamin\u2019s use of \u201cstate of exception\u201d brings to mind Giorgio Agamben\u2019s later examination of \u201cstates of exception\u201d via homo sacer<\/em>.\u00a0 Interestingly, Agamben and Benjamin explicitly respond to German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who in his 1921 essay. “Die Diktatur<\/em>” justified dictatorship during \u201cstates of emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n

28<\/sup>\u00a0See Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory<\/em>. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. p. 30.<\/p>\n

29\u00a0<\/sup>Mariam Lam\u2019s input about the issue of \u201clabor\u201d in \u201cmemory work\u201d productively highlights the issue of production and intent in Cambodian American cultural production.<\/p>\n

30<\/sup>\u00a0James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Their Meaning<\/em> (New Haven, CT:\u00a0 Yale UP, 1993).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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