Citation:
Date Presented:
February 5Abstract:
An experiment in autoethnography, this work explores what being a second-generation Cambodian American means today, forty years after the beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. It draws upon interviews, survivor memoirs, rap music, poetry, and performance to examine the conditions and politics of intergenerational storytelling, primarily arguing how different forms of cultural production allow for unique mechanisms in understanding and transmitting stories of a violent historical past. By bringing the author’s lived experiences to the forefront, this study insists upon demonstrating the challenges of analyzing one’s own sense of inherited trauma, narrative empowerment, and intellectual duty. This approach also asserts a voice—that of a Cambodian’s—and subject matter frequently ignored within larger Asian American scholarship.
Beginning in south central Kentucky, this research journey then moves to Paris, France; Chicago, Illinois; and Lowell, Massachusetts; tracing the transnational and interracial avenues through which each Cambodian immigrant community claims its sense of reconciliation with the past and, consequently, its sense of present-day and future home. Negotiating between a painful and often mysterious family history and a disorienting and sometimes hostile present environment, inheritors of the Cambodian genocide redefine and locate home in the stories they create, and through the act of storytelling itself.