Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung (review)

Abstract

Chapter 1 of Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia opens with a photograph that Y-Dang Troeung encountered in the archive: an image of a smiling Cambodian refugee mother and her young daughter, the latter identified as the “last” refugee of the Canadian government’s Special Indochinese Refugee Program, displayed on the front page of the December 4, 1980 issue of the Montreal Gazette. Troeung writes that this is “an account of goodness—of good refugees entering the good refuge” (48). Yet the child in the photograph is not a silenced subject, a blank page upon which the Global North state can write its humanitarian narrative, erasing centuries of Indigenous genocide and racializing logics. For the child, it is revealed, is Troeung, who stubbornly writes back, revealing a much longer genealogy of the Cold War in Cambodia that preceded her family’s entry into Canada. “Knit[ting] together” autotheory and literary analysis, Refugee Lifeworlds creates a “complex fabric” that reveals the “texture and temporalities of refugee life as embodied and inherited experience” (5). Because it opens chapter 1, this anecdote of archival encounter ostensibly presents a beginning of sorts. But it is a beginning that is delayed, put on hold, coming after a twenty-page preface that outlines the long durée of US intervention in Cambodia and a forty-five-page introduction that outlines the key terms and interventions of the book. In this way, Refugee Lifeworlds presents a formal alternative to “scholarly approaches that often treat the refugee as a figure who comes into being only through arrival in the asylum state,” when “whiteness enters the frame as an adjudicator of the refugee’s humanity” (ix). Moreover, this vignette does not follow the expected script of the liberal subject’s self-possessing arrival to speech. Instead, Troeung reveals moments of stumbling and reversal, of difficulty and denial. As explained in the Introduction, when Troeung wrote to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 2021