Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung

Abstract

Reviewed by: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, by Y-Dang Troeung. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022. Xxvii + 223 pp. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1439921760. Chapter 1 of Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia opens with a photograph that Y-Dang Troeung encountered in the archive: an image of a smiling Cambodian refugee mother and her young daughter, the latter identified as the "last" refugee of the Canadian government's Special Indochinese Refugee Program, displayed on the front page of the December 4, 1980 issue of the Montreal Gazette. Troeung writes that this is "an account of goodness–of good refugees entering the good refuge" (48). Yet the child in the photograph is not a silenced subject, a blank page upon which the Global North state can write its humanitarian narrative, erasing centuries of Indigenous genocide and racializing logics. For the child, it is revealed, is Troeung, who stubbornly writes back, revealing a much longer genealogy of the Cold War in Cambodia that preceded her family's entry into Canada. "Knit[ting] together" autotheory and literary analysis, Refugee Lifeworlds creates a "complex fabric" that reveals the "texture and temporalities of refugee life as embodied and inherited experience" (5). Because it opens chapter 1, this anecdote of archival encounter ostensibly presents a beginning of sorts. But it is a beginning that is delayed, put on hold, coming after a twenty-page preface that outlines the long durée of US intervention in Cambodia and a forty-five-page introduction that outlines the key terms and interventions of the book. In this way, Refugee Lifeworlds presents a formal alternative to "scholarly approaches that often treat the refugee as a figure who comes into being only through arrival in the asylum state," when "whiteness enters the frame as an adjudicator of the refugee's humanity" (ix). Moreover, this vignette does not follow the expected script of the liberal subject's self-possessing arrival to speech. Instead, Troeung reveals moments of stumbling and reversal, of difficulty and denial. As explained in the Introduction, when Troeung wrote to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 2021 [End Page 103] "asking them to take down" photos like these of herself and her family, explaining that she had given them "in a state of mental distress, and that the final article replicated a colonial practice of putting refugee images and information on public display in an exploitative way," the CBC denied the request, citing lack of evidence of a "mental health crisis at the time of the interview" (7–8). This autotheory example–one of many interwoven throughout the text–incisively illustrates the importance of putting critical refugee studies in conversation with critical disability studies: the book's main intervention. Refugee Lifeworlds takes the fact that "a quarter of Cambodia's population died during the genocide, and the remaining three-quarters of the population were physically and mentally debilitated" as a point of departure (12). Engaging critical refugee studies scholars such as Yến Lê Espiritu and Khatharya Um alongside critical disability scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Liat Ben-Moshe, Troeung argues for a shift from "the language of trauma as an individual, knowable impairment to that of disability, understood as both a lived embodiment and system of differential impairment of racialized and gendered bodies" (13). The book curates a "crip Cambodian refugee archive" that enacts a "politics of refusal . . . of imperial, carceral, and white supremacist state violence" (23–24). "Refugee lifeworlds," as an analytic, acknowledges the necropolitical logics of death and destruction that have structured Cambodian subjectivity, even as it asks us to consider what new epistemologies are possible in the wake of genocide. Ultimately, the book underscores the importance of an abolitionist project of "refugee and disability justice for all" (15). Refugee Lifeworlds consists of four body chapters followed by a short autotheory coda. Chapter 1 unpacks "Cambodia's Cold War episteme" which has rendered Cambodia a "minor anecdote" in the colonial imagination, setting up the importance of centering Cambodian narratives (50). The remaining chapters take up...