Global Health and World Literature: Translating Silences in Cambodian Writing on Sex Slavery

Increasing attention to cosmopolitanism, globalization, and transnationalism in the last two decades has led to burgeoning interest in the phenomenon of world literature. But despite the field's emphasis on literature that maintains a crucial relation to the world, scholarship on world literature has not yet examined the relationship between this corpus and many urgent matters of global significance. This article attempts to address some of these lacunae by analyzing the manipulation of silences surrounding sex slavery in different versions of the Cambodian human rights advocate Somaly Mam's Le silence de l'innocence (Silence of Innocence, 2005), including this French-language memoir's Asian-language translations. Silence of Innocence brings to the fore certain aspects of sex trafficking that remain relatively neglected in statistical and sociological accounts. Most noteworthy among these is manipulation of the voices of the abused.