Walking with the Ghost

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Walking with the Ghost: Contested Silences, Memory-Making, and Cambodian/American Histories of Violence A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies by Lina Chhun 2019 © Copyright by Lina Chhun 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Walking with the Ghost: Contested Silences, Memory-Making, and Cambodian/American Histories of Violence by Lina Chhun Doctor of Philosophy in Gender Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Michelle F. Erai, Co-Chair Professor Aisha Finch, Co-Chair Commemoration is highly fraught; memory and history-making are dialectical processes, constituted by the contingent relationship between what is remembered and forgotten, and what Lisa Yoneyama terms the “forgetting of forgetfulness.” Memory-making is always punctuated by acts of forgetting, the proliferation of silences that produce historical amnesias as they also produce, paradoxically perhaps, affective remnants—what Ngô, Nguyen, and Lam (2012) refer to as “the particular resonances of…wars, refugee archives of feeling, and the recursive traces of both” (673). Challenging static renderings of history, “Walking with the Ghost: Contested Silences, Memory-Making, and Cambodian/American Histories of Violence” queries the complex relationships between registers of memory regarding the Cambodian Holocaust of 1975-79 and remembrances of the preceding U.S. bombing campaigns of 1964-1973. This study challenges historical models of “tragedy” and individualized models of trauma—as damage- centered, deviance-driven, and/or invested in abjection, vulnerability, and injury—which ii disavow the complex humanity of Cambodian survivors and the continually intersubjective ways in which knowledge about violence and Cambodia is produced and reproduced. I begin with an analysis of passages from my father's interview regarding the U.S. bombing of Neak Loeung, highlighting the ways experiential registers contain the potential to reproduce as well as trouble dominant Cold War logics. From here, I analyze two cases—the Documentation Center of Cambodia’s framing of its archival mission and artist-documentarian Vandy Rattana’s body of work—addressing the ways archives function to produce different claims to “historical truth” in the afterlife of violence. Following Rattana’s 2009 exhibit “Bomb Ponds”—which photographically depicts the affective pull of landscapes in conjunction with the need to listen to experiential narratives—I then center the “landscape ethnography” as one site of memory-making concerning the U.S. bombing campaigns. Expanding the notion of “living archive,” I employ a capacious understanding of the everyday, assessing how landscapes and stories-in-motion make visible the violence of Cold War histories. Centering an analysis of the multiple meanings of crossing in two oral histories, I end with an exploration of the relational affects and effects of violence and trauma as they travel across time and space. Thinking through queer temporalities, (enforced) transit, and the phenomenon of return, I grapple with notions of justice and reparation in the afterlife of historical violence, thinking reparation not as “repair”— “to fix”—but as “amends,” “to mend,” and therefore, to do the work of care. iii The dissertation of Lina Chhun is approved. Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo Juliet A. Williams Michelle F. Erai, Committee Co-Chair Aisha Finch, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2019 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction Walking with the Ghost: 1 On Feminist Epistemologies and Feminist Praxis Chapter One “Sometime American Can. .Make Mistake Too. .” 41 Memory, Documentation and Contested Framings of Violence Chapter Two Living Archives and Spatial Histories: 74 Landscape Ethnography and an Accounting for the Present Chapter Three Walking with the Ghost: 113 On Affective Archives and the Work of Care Conclusion The Koh Tree 147 Notes 159 Bibliography 170 v LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. “Stone plaque” superimposed on “Rubber trees in formation” 5 and Takeo (2009) by Vandy Rattana. Image by Mary Uyematsu Kao Figure 2. CMAC map of Cambodia, Landmines and Unexploded Ordnance 34 Figure 3. Khmer Rouge Trial 7 (2009). 59 Digital C-Print. 60 x 90 cm/Edition of 5 + 2AP. Photograph by Vandy Rattana Figure 4. Takeo (2009). Digital C-Print. 91 x 111 cm. 61 Edition of 5 + AP. Photograph by Vandy Rattana Figure 5. Kompong Thom, Sambor Prey Kuk (2009). 64 Digital C-Print. 91 x 111 cm. Edition of 5 + AP. Photograph by Vandy Rattana Figure 6. Rubber trees in formation, Tbong Khmum Province (2015). 68 Photograph by Linda Chhath Figure 7. Stone plaque, Tbong Khmum Province (2015). 69 Photograph by Linda Chhath Figure 8. Bomb Crater at Lumphat, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 70 Photograph by Heang Chhun Figure 9. Banana Tree in a Bomb Crater, Mondulkiri Province (2016). 81 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 10. Crossing the Tonle San, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 89 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 11. Bomb Crater at Lumphat, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 90 Photograph by Heang Chhun Figure 12. Boundary marker at Lumphat, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 94 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 13. Water tower at Lumphat, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 94 Photograph by Lina Chhun vi Figure 14. Interior of bombed building at Lumphat (2016). 99 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 15. Exterior of second building at Lumphat (2016). 100 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 16. Sign at Yeak Loam Lake, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 100 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 17. History of Yeak Loam Lake, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 101 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 18. Yeak Loam Lake, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 101 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 19. Yeak Laom Lake nearing sunset, Ratanakiri Province (2016). 103 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 20. Installation Piece, Cascading “Bombies,” COPE 107 (Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise) Vistor Centre, Centre for Medical Rehabilitation (CMR), Vientiane, Laos (2016). Photograph taken by Lina Chhun Figure 21. The new hospital in Neak Luong, Prey Veng Province (2017). 108 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 22. Along the Mekong River, Neak Luong (2017). 109 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 23. (Bomb) Ponds at Stung Sloat, Prey Veng Province (2017). 109 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 24. Blue marker marking UXO, Stung Sloat (2017). 110 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 25. Close up, blue marker marking UXO, Stung Sloat (2017). 110 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 26. The Mekong river nearing sunset in Neak Loeung (2017). 112 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 27. On the road to Battambang (2016). 142 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 28. Pagoda grounds on the way back to Phnom Penh (2016). 143 Photograph by Lina Chhun vii Figure 29. Pagoda on the way back to Phnom Penh (2016). 144 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 30. Former grounds of labor camp (2016). 145 Photograph taken by Lina Chhun Figure 31. Kapok tree at Ta Prohm Temple, 154 Angkor, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia. Photographed by Victor Yezhov, Provided by Liny Chhun Figure 32. Close-up of kapok tree at Ta Prohm Temple. 155 Photograph by Lina Chhun Figure 33. Wide-Shot, Ta Prohm Temple, 158 Angkor, Siem Reap Province. Photographed by Victor Yezhov, Provided by Liny Chhun viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many people who’ve been an integral part of my graduate school journey and have supported me through the conceptualization, writing, and completion of the dissertation. First and foremost, I want to thank my Co-Chair and friend, Michelle Erai, whose mentorship began even before I officially accepted UCLA. Michelle, you have taught me to trust in my heart and mind, allowing what could’ve been categorized as “too much sensitivity” to emerge as the sensibility with which I’ve come to find my way, through this project and academia at large. A version of Chapter One was published in Amerasia Journal; I thank the blind reviewers, Arnold Pan, Keith Camacho, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Yen Le Espiritu, Lisa Yoneyama, and Mary Kao for their amazing feedback and support during the publication process. The dissertation also draws intermittently from a publication in The Feminist Wire, and I am thankful to Associate Editors Mick and Heather for their patience and time in working with me on this three-part series. A forthcoming article in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies draws from Chapter Three and the Conclusion, and I thank the two amazing blind reviewers, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, and Cindy Cruz for their detailed and generative feedback and patience in working with me. UCLA Graduate Division has provided invaluable funding in many forms over the last eight years, including a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship and a Dissertation Year Fellowship. I would like to extend my gratitude to the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies for their immeasurable support in funding my language study, field research, and initial stages of dissertation writing through the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. I am also grateful to the Center for the Study of Women, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the UCLA International Institute, and the UC Critical Refugee Studies Collective for the generous financial support that allowed me to travel to conferences, symposia, and workshops to engage ix and refine my work, supported my initial sixteen months of fieldwork and follow-up research trip of two months to Cambodia, and significantly contributed to the completion of this dissertation. I want to thank the amazing faculty members I have been privileged to work with, beginning with my dissertation committee members. An immense thank you to Aisha Finch, who generously filled the role of Co-Chair in the latter stages of my time at UCLA, offering invaluable guidance and detailed feedback regarding the dissertation and writing more letters of recommendation on my behalf during my time on the academic job market, than I can count. Juliet Williams, thank you so much for teaching me to stand in the place I know and for providing a model of pedagogy steadfast in its integrity.

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