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

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work advances a strong theoretical framework informed by the literature of trauma and memory, Asian American literary criticism, and cultural studies to interpret the cultural production of Cambodian Americans. This book argues that because of the enormity of the scope of the “killing fields,” Khmer Americans’ cultural production cannot be read and interpreted solely from a domestic lens. Rather, it necessitates a transnational perspective. The fight against racism on U.S. soil comes simultaneously with how Cambodian history is presented in the United States. The book examines a period of time when artists and intellectuals were brutally targeted for assassination, resulting in the death of 1.7 million Cambodians. It is no coincidence, Cathy Schlund-Vials argues, that Cambodian American artists engage tirelessly with genocide, human rights, and civil rights and the cultural aphasia produced by this period. She urges readers to see, hear, and validate what is being expressed and to take action.

Schlund-Vials’s introduction, theoretical framework, and close reading of Khmer American film, literature, hip-hop, and art is an ambitious project. Contrary to how this event is represented in the United States, the author insists that the U.S. role in the genocide in Cambodia be remembered. Schlund-Vials challenges the claim of U.S. exceptionalism and the rhetoric depicting itself a fighter of the free world. The author reminds the reader that these atrocities, where near 25 percent of an entire population died, were a direct consequence of American military and financial involvement in the region. Through a diverse means of national amnesia and selective representation, what Schlund-Vials calls “schemes of strategic remembering,” the United States effectively evaded both “culpability and accountability” at the expense of those who were victims of the atrocities in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.

In order to restore these memories, Schlund-Vials introduces the historical context from which these pieces emerge. Her close reading of Cambodian American cultural production shows how Cambodian American experiences and the identities they produce have been and continue to be heavily impacted by Cold War politics. In order to understand Cambodian American art and literature, the author argues that one must consider the recent history of Cambodia in relation to geopolitics and racial dynamics in the United States. For instance, unlike how the movie The Killing Fields is often regarded as an authoritative account of what took place in Cambodia after the end of the Vietnam War, the author shows that it is actually filled with inaccuracies, gaps, and biases. The ahistorical representation of the genocide leads to a pathologizing interpretation of the Khmer Rouge. This movie elides the role played by the United States in helping the Khmer Rouge come into power in the first place, something she insists is absolutely necessary to understand Cambodian American identities articulated in literature, art, and film.

In another example, Schlund-Vials examines how discourses about the genocide continue to focus on the perpetuators of violence. Through dark tourism, the author argues that the genocide has been commodified at the expense of legal justice and collective healing. Her discussion of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where three hundred detainees were executed daily between 1977 and 1978, specifically serves foreigners’ incredulous and nonreflexive gaze.

In contrast, Schlund-Vials examines Cambodian American cultural production as a site of resistance and an alternative to these dominant narratives by framing them from the survivors’ perspective. By focusing on survivor memory, her work engages in a renegotiation of history. According to the author, memory plays a central role in resisting national investments in forgetting, erasing, or truncating the past. Khmer American cultural production embodies what Schlund-Vials calls a “tripartite identity formed by way of catastrophic collisions with U.S. cold war foreign policy, traumatically shaped by Khmer Rouge totalitarianism, and problematically fixed to post-Vietnam humanitarianism” (25). These...