Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology by Margaret Jack (review)

Reviewed by:

• Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology by Margaret Jack
• Peter Manning (bio)

Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology
By Margaret Jack. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 264.

It is still common today for news coverage, film, and much human rights scholarship to depict Cambodia as a broken, corrupt, authoritarian, violent, dysfunctional, and amnesiac cultural and political space. Such tropes risk the reproduction of pathologizing and flattening representations of Cambodia that present a helpless country whose postgenocide present is inescapably defined and trapped by its own violent history. In Media Ruins, Margaret Jack offers an important corrective to these tendencies by developing a historical account of the material relations within and with media infrastructures across Cambodia’s multiple historical transitions and conflicts. Jack does so with an emphasis on contingency, a commitment to nuance in her reading of the histories of Cambodia’s media architecture, and a strong sense of relational Cambodian agency within these accounts.

Media Ruins speaks across disciplinary audiences. The book places histories of material media infrastructures in Cambodia into dialogue with themes in memory studies, postconflict and peacebuilding responses, and more orthodox histories of Cambodia’s recovery from the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975–79). Readers with a background in memory studies are asked to take seriously the role of material objects and artifacts within processes of both memory and forgetting—including transmitters, radios, projectors, film reels, [End Page 1017] and the audiovisual (representational) content disseminated through them. For readers with a background in human rights, peacebuilding, or transitional justice, Media Ruins asks us to think through processes of social and cultural transition from violence away from more conventional institutional spaces, such as the ballot box or courtroom. For area studies readers, or those interested in more disciplinary histories of Cambodia, Media Ruins develops several important new angles on the histories of political control and contestation during Cambodia’s prewar and postgenocide periods. Jack adeptly situates the material architecture of media within these stories as sites that are both constituted by and deeply constitutive of their historical contexts.

Reading Media Ruins, two important concepts developed by Jack tend to stay with you. The work of “infrastructural restitution” is the signature concept running throughout the text. By this, Jack refers to the creative practices that seek to restore and reconstruct media artifacts and infrastructures. This work is undertaken by a range of actors. Some are themselves survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, but many are young and occupy uneasy relations to their own family (and national) histories as members of a “postmemory” generation (as M. Hirsch calls it in “The Generation of Postmemory,” 2008). Such younger Cambodians live amid the material traces and imprints of both the legacies of past violence and, often jarringly, the tumultuous changes to the built landscape that Cambodia has experienced in recent decades. Through interviews and immersive methods around screenings and conservation efforts, Jack shows the work of infrastructural restitution to be affecting and affective; melancholic and yet cathartic; politically constrained and yet furnishing a subtle counterpolitics to contemporary authoritarianisms. The restoration of old prewar media artifacts represents an “emotional access point” (p. 150) to the past, where media content and form become inseparable as they operate as commemorative devices. A second, more narrowly applied concept that demonstrates the deep ambivalences in this work is developed through observations of “disintegration noise” (p. 135). By this, Jack calls attention to the processes of physical decay at work that afflict the material copies of (restored) media. This noise is manifest in gaps, lapses, or distortions that simultaneously demonstrate and rescue an authentic past but also signal its absence and loss. Throughout the text, Jack is quick to note that these fragments of memory often offer fragments of a historical picture that itself also glosses over past social inequalities and antagonisms.

The intent and contribution of Media Ruins is perhaps best captured in Jack’s account of one particular screening. A restored film from prewar 1960s Cambodia was to be shown, but the slow decay of the original physical reels meant that it could not be fully recovered in its entire sequence. It was...