Cambodian American Memory Work: Justice and the “Cambodian Syndrome”

This essay examines the impact of transnational historical amnesias on Cambodian American genocidal remembrance. Arguing that the “Cambodian syndrome” revises the “Vietnam syndrome” in a manner that legitimizes contemporary US and Cambodian governmental power, this essay shifts to an overview of Cambodian American cultural production in order to explore the status of memory in the country of origin and the country of settlement, and to illustrate the ways Cambodian American film, literature, and art are engaged in multiple forms of resistance that potently revise the “Cambodian syndrome” and are productively rooted in “memory work.”