As a Wall Scholar, Prof. Troeung plans to complete her book manuscript on the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, a project that investigates the relationship between war, refuge, and creative reparation. The book casts renewed attention on one of the worst refugee catastrophes of the twentieth century: the ruination extending from the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge regime. Cambodia, a nation which became a “hot” laboratory of ideology and proxy war for the global superpowers during the Cold War, haunts the memory of the world, yet there remains a collective silence about this history. The book turns to literature, film, and auto-theory as a means of addressing this silence, arguing that attention to Cambodia’s past is crucial to understanding and challenging the necropolitics and collateralization of life occurring in the war zones of today.
Prof. Troeung will also use her time at the Peter Wall Institute to begin working on a second project entitled Land Bridge. A term originating from the field of biogeography, a land bridge refers to the formation or surfacing of a geographical land mass that connects two larger areas across an expanse of water. Drawing inspiration from the Cambodian land bridge of 1979, this interdisciplinary, creative non-fiction project will consider the network form of refugee land bridges wherein human flows connect the borders of refugee camps and homelands.
