Reframing Human Rights Discourse: Justice and Cambodian Life Stories in English

Over thirty years after the Cambodia genocide of 1975-79, which took the lives of an estimated 2.2 million Cambodians, the Extraordinary Courts in the Chambers of Cambodia (ECCC) have begun tribunal hearings for what has been described as “the largest and most complicated prosecution since Nuremberg in 1945” (Andrew Cayley). But as Julie McGonegal notes in her book Imagining Justice, truth and reconciliation commissions have tended towards a “privileging of discourses of forensic truth and a devaluation of stories and literature” (180). My research project entitled “Reframing Human Rights Discourse: Justice and Cambodian Life Stories in English” will consider how Cambodian diasporic life stories (as found in oral history, literature, and film) serve as a rich site for understanding difficult questions about justice in the aftermath of genocide: How are notions of trauma read differently across cultural, national, gendered, and generational divides, and what are the implications of these epistemological differences for thinking about justice? What is the relationship between the mobilization of life stories and the collective work of reconciliation? Finally, how might life stories productively reframe and call attention to the limitations of international human rights discourse in the twenty-first century?My research will explore how Cambodian life stories in English not only bear witness to a truth beyond what is empirically verifiable, but they also have a creative license to imagine potential futures beyond the trauma, a creativity that is not as readily available in anthropological, sociological, and legal texts. Scholars have noted that the need to bear witness “provides one explanation for why there has been more life writing by or about Cambodians than by or about any other ethnic cohort in the United States during the past several decades” (Yamada 147). Trends parallel to the American context are now taking place in other parts of the world, evidenced by the recent emergence of Cambodian literature, film, and oral history in English in places such as Canada, Australia, and Cambodia. This body of cultural production reconstructs a traumatic past that haunts not just the memory of Cambodians, but also twentieth-century collective memory. In analyzing a selection of this archive, my project will contribute knowledge to the overlapping fields of life writing, oral history, human rights cultural studies, critical genocide studies, refugee studies, and the study of Cambodian diaspora.