A Transnational Hip Hop Nation: praCh, Cambodia, and Memorialising the Killing Fields

Abstract

Through a close reading of Cambodian American rapper praCh's Dalama: The End'n Is Just the Beginnin’, I argue that his work embodies musical traditions, histories, and experiences from both the country of origin and the country of settlement. In analysing the story of its reception in Cambodia, I place his work within a larger schema of Cambodian American youth cultural production, which is marked by attempts to negotiate complicated US racial politics and mediate refugee subjectivities. Most important, praCh and other Cambodian American Hip Hop artists (which include graffiti artists, b-boys, and DJs) memorialise in their work the Killing Fields, and this memorialisation is geographically and culturally located in the United States and Cambodia. Thus, domestically produced and globally consumed, praCh's work creates a transnationally inflected space in which to simultaneously consider questions of selfhood, notions of belonging, and conceptualisations of nationhood. Circumscribed by both Cold War US foreign policy and domestic refugee initiatives, Cambodian American citizenship prompts the question not only of what it means to be American, but also what it means to be Cambodian and Cambodian American in light of a genocidal history.