Session Name: Intertwined Histories: Culture, Religion, and Identity II
On The Tragedy of Cambodian Historiography: Cold War Orientalisms and Colonial Modernity
Monday, July 29, 2024
16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: One cannot read or write about Cambodia without encountering David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia or The Tragedy of Cambodian History. In both texts, Chandler engages an explicit narrative emplotment of Cambodian history as tragedy, linking Cambodia’s fate to its location between Vietnam and Thailand and to unique and long-standing cultural characteristics of Cambodian hierarchical social relations and a particularly Cambodian psyche. Although critiques of static Cambodian historical frameworks exist, and although Chandler himself becomes more measured and somewhat more reflexive in later editions of his foundational texts, “tragedy” remains the predominant frame of reference in understandings of Cambodia, overdetermining and undermining the speculative pasts and futures we might tell and foresee. Reading “the tragedy of Cambodian history” alongside a parallel history of the Indonesian Massacres of 1965–66 and drawing upon David Scott’s discussion of historical emplotment and colonial modernity and Michel Rolph-Trouillot’s analysis of silences and historicity in regard to historiography of the Haitian Revolution, this paper addresses the unmarked sites where silences enter the historical record, conditioning the commonsense slippage of Cambodia and tragedy. Positioning Cambodian historiography instead as tragedy—and identifying the tragedy here as (colonial) modernity rather than Cambodian culture—in this paper, I analyze how unmarked investments in liberal modernity conscript Southeast Asian subjects into dominant historical narratives, binding these subjects to a predetermined failure in the past, present and far into the future.
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