Remembering the Forgetting

Abstract

This chapter presents a reading of writer, poet, and performer Anida Yoeu Ali’s epic poem “Visiting Loss” and installation piece “Palimpsest for Generation 1.5.” These two works reproduce a transnational refugee subjectivity formed in the interstices of U.S. foreign policy, Cambodian genocide, Cambodian American remembrance, and juridical activism. The chapter concludes that Cambodian American memories form the foundation for a multivalent archive constitutive of Cambodian history, Khmer/American culture, and U.S. racial politics. From memoir to documentary, from hip-hop to staged performance, Cambodian American cultural producers strategically access legible forms of testimony within the United States to generate both a literal and an imagined space of justice in Cambodia while living in the United States.