The coloniality of abridgment: afterlives of mass violence in Cambodia and the US

Abstract

This article examines processes of knowledge production around mass violence in 1970s Cambodia including media reportage and coeval scholarly debate, developing a conceptualisation of colonial abridgment. It assesses operations by which Cambodia as a country is violently essentialised, the occurrence of mass violence taking on metonymic grandeur that works to deny imperial legacies, entomb modern Cambodia in a hermetically sealed past and thereby maintain global order within existing racial-colonial logics.

Keywords:

• Genocide
• Cambodia
• abridgment
• neocolonialism
• mass violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this work were presented at the 2016 Millennium Conference Racialized Realities in World Politics with the support of the Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota and ISA’s 2017 National Conference with the support of a Community of Scholars Travel Grant from UMN’s Office of Equity and Diversity. Appreciation for the generous comments of three anonymous reviewers and unending thanks to Randolph B. Persaud, Naren Kumarakulasingam, Himadeep Muppidi, Andy K. Bush, Andy Davison, Bud Duvall, Rob Nichols, Rachmi Diyah Larasati, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Majo Mendez Gutierrez, Jason Vargas, Lillian Kalish, Jacqueline Muñoz Geoghegan, Madeleine McCarthy, Bethany Donovan, Colin Walker Wingate, Pamela Dolin, members of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workshop and many others for their thoughtful counsel and conversation, indispensable in honing these ideas.

Notes

1 Smith, “The Embassy of Cambodia,” 0–3.

2 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 39.

3 Moten, “Notes on Passage,” 53.

4 Fabian, Time and the Other, 31.

5 Merriam-Webster, s.v. “Abridgment,” accessed 19 August 2018.

6 Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia,” 62–69.

7 Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia,” 68.

8 Shawcross, Sideshow; Kiernan, “Coming to Terms.”

9 Ear, “The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975–1979,” 43–69.

10 Ibid.

11 Smith, “The Embassy of Cambodia,” 0–9.

12 Shapiro, “Insurrectional Arts,” 888.

13 Kiernan, “Documentation Delayed”; Kiernan, “Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice”; Ear, “The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975–1979.”

14 Lacouture, “The Bloodiest Revolution.”

15 Herman and Chomsky, After the Cataclysm.

16 Alexander, “On the Social Construction,” 202.

17 Barron and Paul, Murder of a Gentle Land; Porter and Hildebrand, Cambodia; Chomsky and Herman, “Distortions at Fourth Hand.”

18 Lacouture, “Cambodia: Corrections”; Chomsky and Herman, “Distortions at Fourth Hand.”

19 Bizot, Facing the Torturer, 159; See also the record of Bizot’s testimony at ECCC Trial Day 6, 8/4/2009 Case No. 001/18-07-2007-ECCC/TC KAING GUEK EAV, 72.

20 Graves, “Holocaust II!” New York Times 26 November 1978; Lacouture, Survive le peuple Cambodgien! in Ear, “The Khmer Rouge Canon”; Thayer, “Khmer Rouge Apologist Chomsky”; Manne, “Robert Manne Responds,” Quadrant, April 1982; Miller, “Chomsky Peace Award Blasted,” The Weekend Australian, 3 June 2002.

21 Herman, “Chomsky and the Khmer Rouge,” New York Times, 27 March 1998; Herman and Chomsky, After the Cataclysm, 162.

22 Ear, “The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975–1979,” 41.

23 Chomsky and Herman, “Distortions at Fourth Hand”; Mertha, Brothers in Arms.

24 Kiernan, “Documentation Delayed.”

25 Ciociari, “Auto-Genocide.”

26 Kiernan, “Documentation Delayed,” 480.

27 Butler, Frames of War; Rodríguez, “Inhabiting the Impasse,” 24–5. As Rodríguez speaks to, the effacement which always already occurs with the imposition of the word genocide does not foreclose the potential for its emancipatory re-appropriation – indeed, this phenomenon likewise circulates in relation to Cambodia–, however, my emphasis here stems from what I perceive as an oversight in both everyday understanding and existing academic literature.

28 Hughes, “Memory and Sovereignty,” 269. See also the important oral historical work of DC-Cam.

29 Hughes, “Abject Artefacts of Memory,” 25.

30 Chandler, Voices from S-21, 6; Mertha, Brothers in Arms; Ciociari, “Auto-Genocide.”

31 Tyner et al., “Violence and the Dialectics of Landscape,” 286; Keo and Yin, Fact Sheet, 5.

32 DC-Cam Mapping Project; Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice, 30; Tyner et al., “Violence and the Dialectics of Landscape,” 277.

33 Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice, 49.

34 Ibid., 30.

35 Ibid., 49.

36 Hughes, “Memory and Sovereignty,” 273.

37 Moten, “Notes on Passage,” 53.

38 Ibid.

39 Hughes, “Memory and Sovereignty,” 284.

40 Lacouture, “Probing the Cambodian Agency”; Fabian, Time and the Other, 31.

41 Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice, 41.

42 Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable; Hughes, “Abject Artefacts of Memory,” 24.

43 Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum,” 13; Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 61.

44 Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum,” 88.

45 Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice, 64.

46 Tyner et al., “Violence and the Dialectics of Landscape,” 287; Hughes, “Abject Artefacts of Memory,” 33.

47 Panh, The Missing Picture.

48 Ibid.; Panh S-21; Panh, Duch.

49 Becker, “Minor Characters.”

50 Becker, When the War was Over: Voices, 10–12, 26; Becker, Bophana, 26.

51 Becker, When the War was Over: Voices, 224.

52 Becker, When the War was Over: Voices, 224; Becker, When the War was Over: Cambodia, 212.

53 Becker, Bophana, 27.

54 Becker, When the War was Over: Voices, 226.

55 Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice, 120.

56 Chandler, Voices from S-21, 161.

57 Becker, When the War was Over: Voices, 230.

58 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 5.

59 Ibid., 11–12.

60 Smith, “The Embassy of Cambodia,” 0–9.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Mitamura

Emily Mitamura is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota studying political theory and international relations. Her work proceeds from commitments to the study of postcoloniality, knowledge production and race. With an emphasis on the brutalities of the everyday, she engages problematics of aesthetics, archiving and the politics of memory around histories of mass violence.