War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Abstract

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work, by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 243 pages. As our everyday attention grows saturated by media reports of bloodshed, massacre, and atrocity, this moment in twenty-first century presents us with challenges of literacy, epistemology, and ethical response. How can we resist consuming representations of mass and systemic violence as sensation and spectacle, and instead bear witness to suffering of disempowered? How do we dismantle forms of knowledge and affect that erase this pain or appropriate it into narratives designed to bolster dominant ideologies? And how might we create new epistemologies, new ways of feeling, that work toward repairing and averting such psychic and material ruptures? Cathy J. Schlund-Vials's War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work explores how Cambodian American writers and artists grapple with difficult task of giving shape and texture to a history that is searing and almost ungraspable. When tragedy assumes a massive scale, numbers and quantity paradoxically gesture toward what is immeasurable: Between 1975 and 1979, over course of three years, eight months, and twenty days, Khmer Rouge was responsible for deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians (21 to 25 percent of extant population) due to execution, torture, starvation, overwork, and disease (2). Loss of this magnitude feels beyond apprehension, but Schlund-Vials eloquently points out that emotional and material labor of Cambodian American artists in confronting their traumatic history provides necessary alternatives to official practices of selective and forestalled justice. This Cambodian American memory work helps to mitigate against what Schlund-Vials calls the Cambodian a recasting of Nixon's and Reagan's Syndrome. Conservative politicians and pundits believed that American military and moral superiority were undermined by an anti-interventionist domestic during era of Vietnam War (also known in Vietnam as American War). The Cambodian Syndrome, by contrast, comprises a useable past for a pro-intervention imperial politics. George W. Bush, for example, justified US military presence in Iraq and Middle East by portraying absence of American intervention during Khmer Rouge regime as true tragedy, a framing that erased role that US bombings of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 played in enabling rise of Khmer Rouge. Like American heads of state, government representatives in Cambodia likewise stage acts of selective remembering that entail strategic forgetting. Vietnamese occupiers in 1979-1989 era, invested in legitimating their rule of Cambodia, emphasized criminality of previous regime at expense of its victims' needs, while former Khmer Rouge members participating in current Cambodian government leadership call upon fellow citizens to bury past (175). It is this transnational set of amnesiac politics (13), argues Schlund-Vials, that 1.5-generation Cambodian American writers and artists work against. In suggesting how musical tones and samples disinter dead, or how trope of birds potently conveys embodied struggles of migration and dislocation, or how literary genres like autobiography become subject to judicial cross-examination, Schlund-Vials skillfully integrates aesthetic, political, historical, and juridical considerations into her assessment of diasporic cultural production. In absence of legal justice, she argues, remembrance activists stage alternative means to justice, healing, and reclamation, makeshift and grassroots practices of restoration designed to stand in when official reparations seem elusive (18). In thirty years between Khmer Rouge atrocities and her composition of book, only one official had been convicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. …