Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670963
- eISBN:
- 9781452946924
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670963.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter compares Roland Joffé’s Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields (1984) with Cambodian American Socheata Poeuv’s New Year Baby (2006). The Killing Fields is a master narrative of ...
More
This chapter compares Roland Joffé’s Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields (1984) with Cambodian American Socheata Poeuv’s New Year Baby (2006). The Killing Fields is a master narrative of redemption and liberation that draws on a now-familiar Vietnam War trope of American saviors and Southeast Asian victims, while New Year Baby is an intergenerational story premised on the Khmer Rouge’s policy of forced marriage. Poeuv’s particular emphasis on Democratic Kampuchean biopower foregrounds a deeper consideration of biopolitics and necropolitics. The chapter evaluates the role that apology plays in reconciling the genocidal past, incorporating author Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” as a means to explore the impact of parental trauma on children of survivors.Less
This chapter compares Roland Joffé’s Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields (1984) with Cambodian American Socheata Poeuv’s New Year Baby (2006). The Killing Fields is a master narrative of redemption and liberation that draws on a now-familiar Vietnam War trope of American saviors and Southeast Asian victims, while New Year Baby is an intergenerational story premised on the Khmer Rouge’s policy of forced marriage. Poeuv’s particular emphasis on Democratic Kampuchean biopower foregrounds a deeper consideration of biopolitics and necropolitics. The chapter evaluates the role that apology plays in reconciling the genocidal past, incorporating author Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” as a means to explore the impact of parental trauma on children of survivors.
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670963
- eISBN:
- 9781452946924
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670963.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
In the three years, eight months, and twenty days of the Khmer Rouge’s deadly reign over Cambodia, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished as a result of forced labor, execution, starvation, and ...
More
In the three years, eight months, and twenty days of the Khmer Rouge’s deadly reign over Cambodia, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished as a result of forced labor, execution, starvation, and disease. Despite the passage of more than thirty years, two regime shifts, and a contested U.N. intervention, only one former Khmer Rouge official has been successfully tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity in an international court of law to date. It is against this background of war, genocide, and denied justice that this text explores the work of 1.5-generation Cambodian American artists and writers. Drawing on what James Young labels “memory work”—the collected articulation of large-scale human loss—this book investigates the remembrance work of Cambodian American cultural producers through film, memoir, and music. The text includes interviews with artists such as Anida Yoeu Ali, praCh Ly, Sambath Hy, and Socheata Poeuv. Alongside the enduring legacy of the Killing Fields and post-9/11 deportations of Cambodian American youth, artists potently reimagine alternative sites for memorialization, reclamation, and justice. Traversing borders, these artists generate forms of genocidal remembrance that combat amnesic politics and revise citizenship practices in the United States and Cambodia.Less
In the three years, eight months, and twenty days of the Khmer Rouge’s deadly reign over Cambodia, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished as a result of forced labor, execution, starvation, and disease. Despite the passage of more than thirty years, two regime shifts, and a contested U.N. intervention, only one former Khmer Rouge official has been successfully tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity in an international court of law to date. It is against this background of war, genocide, and denied justice that this text explores the work of 1.5-generation Cambodian American artists and writers. Drawing on what James Young labels “memory work”—the collected articulation of large-scale human loss—this book investigates the remembrance work of Cambodian American cultural producers through film, memoir, and music. The text includes interviews with artists such as Anida Yoeu Ali, praCh Ly, Sambath Hy, and Socheata Poeuv. Alongside the enduring legacy of the Killing Fields and post-9/11 deportations of Cambodian American youth, artists potently reimagine alternative sites for memorialization, reclamation, and justice. Traversing borders, these artists generate forms of genocidal remembrance that combat amnesic politics and revise citizenship practices in the United States and Cambodia.
