Book
War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work
War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work is a 2012 book by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials on how Cambodian Americans remember the Khmer Rouge years.[1][2] Its subject is how Cambodians and Cambodian Americans remember and forget the genocide, and what is at stake in that remembering.[1]
About the book
The book centers on the 1.5 generation of Cambodian Americans, the filmmakers, writers, musicians and performance artists whose parents lived through the Killing Fields era.[2][3] It takes up film, memoir, music, poetry and performance as forms of survivor remembrance. In the author's reading, these works become ways of seeking justice, healing and cultural reclamation.[1] The book draws on the idea of "memory work," first used by James Young for Holocaust memorials.[3][2]
Schlund-Vials gives the name "Cambodian Syndrome" to a transnational politics of forgetting, carried through dominant public policy and memory practices.[4]
The book has an introduction, four chapters and an epilogue.[1] The first chapter turns to memorial sites in Cambodia, among them the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the memorial at Choeung Ek. The second sets Roland Joffé's film The Killing Fields beside Socheata Poeuv's documentary New Year Baby. The third reads two memoirs, Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father and Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats.[1] The fourth is about the Dalama trilogy by the Southern California rapper praCh Ly, a bilingual hip-hop memoir that brings together survivor oral histories, traditional Cambodian music and American hip-hop.[1][3] His album Dalama: The End'n Is Just the Beginnin' retells his father's account of atrocities and survival during the Killing Fields.[2] The epilogue turns to Anida Yoeu Ali's poem "Visiting Loss" and her installation Palimpsest for Generation 1.5.[1]
Publication and editions
The University of Minnesota Press published the book in Minneapolis in October 2012.[5] The Prach Ly site gives the date as November 11, 2012.[3] The paperback has 264 pages; a review in Genocide Studies and Prevention gives 243 pages.[1][6]
- Hardback: ISBN 978-0-8166-7096-3[5]
- Paperback: ISBN 978-0-8166-7097-0[5]
- Online edition, Minnesota Scholarship Online, August 24, 2015: ISBN 9781452946924[7]
Parts of the introduction first appeared in the journal positions in the summer of 2012, as "Cambodian American Memory Work: Justice and the 'Cambodian Syndrome.'" Material close to the fourth chapter appeared in Life Writing in 2008, as "A Transnational Hip Hop Nation: praCh, Cambodia, and Memorialising the Killing Fields."[5]
Reception
In April 2013, Schlund-Vials received the Early Career Award of the Association for Asian American Studies, in part for this book.[2] Lisa Yoneyama of the University of Toronto called the book insightful.[3] It was reviewed in MELUS in 2014 and in Genocide Studies and Prevention.[4][6]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Purdue e-Pubs, book review
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 UConn Today, Asian American Studies Professor Earns National Honor, April 24, 2013
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Prach Ly
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Oxford University Press, MELUS review
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Minnesota Scholarship Online, copyright page
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol. 8, no. 2, review by Amy Fagin (2014)
- ↑ Minnesota Scholarship Online, index