How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale. Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. Her book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French filmmaker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive. Boreth Ly’s poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. Her interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed, including photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, she shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

This National Book Award nominee from two-time finalist Patricia McCormick is the unforgettable story of Arn Chorn-Pond, who defied the odds to survive the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge. Based on the true story of Cambodian advocate Arn Chorn-Pond, and authentically told from his point of view as a young boy, this is an achingly raw and powerful historical novel about a child of war who becomes a man of peace. It includes an author's note and acknowledgments from Arn Chorn-Pond himself. When soldiers arrive in his hometown, Arn is just a normal little boy. But after the soldiers march the entire population into the countryside, his life is changed forever. Arn is separated from his family and assigned to a labor camp: working in the rice paddies under a blazing sun, he sees the other children dying before his eyes. One day, the soldiers ask if any of the kids can play an instrument. Arn's never played a note in his life, but he volunteers. This decision will save his life, but it will pull him into the very center of what we know today as the Killing Fields. And just as the country is about to be liberated, Arn is handed a gun and forced to become a soldier. Supports the Common Core State Standards.

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation charts the connections between photography and a crucial issue in contemporary social history. The book examines the prevalence of photography in cultural responses to processes of truth and reconciliation, and argues that photographs are a valuable means through which stories can be retold and historiography can be rethought. Five compelling case studies from Argentina, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Cambodia underscore the special role that this medium has played in facilitating processes of recovery, and in reconstructing suppressed histories, even when a documentary record of the events does not exist. The diverse practices addressed in this book – including artistic, protest, institutional, archival, legal and personal photography – prompt a new consideration of photography’s links to presence, place, time, spectatorship and justice. Collectively, these practices attest to photography’s key role in transitional justice, and in shaping historical understanding internationally. Important reading for students taking photography, visual culture, history and media studies courses, Photography, Truth and Reconciliation explores key historical and theoretical themes, including photography and testimony, international discourses on human rights and justice, and problematic notions of public and collective memory.

Cambodian Rock Band is not yet available to license. By clicking the Request License button, you can sign up to be notified when this title becomes available. In 1978, Chum fled Cambodia and narrowly escaped the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Thirty years later he returns in search of his wayward daughter, Neary. Jumping back and forth in time, thrilling mystery meets rock concert as both father and daughter are forced to face the music of the past. From playwright Lauren Yee (King of the Yees, The Great Leap) comes a story filled with horror, humor, pathos, and songs by the best unknown rock band in Cambodia!

Taking a theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective, the essays in this collection provide compelling insight into contemporary Cambodian culture at home and abroad. The book represents the first sustained exploration of the relationship between cultural productions and practices, the changing urban landscape and the construction of identity and nation building twenty-five years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. As such, the team of international contributors address the politics of development and conservation, tradition and modernity within the global economy, and transmigratory movements of the twenty-first century. Expressions of Cambodia presents a new dimension to the Cambodian studies by engaging the country in current debates about globalization and the commodification of culture, post-colonial politics and identity constructions. Timely and much-needed, this volume brings Cambodia back into dialogue with its neighbours, and in so doing, valuably contributes to the growing field of Southeast Asian cultural studies.

A riveting survey of almost three hundred posters, revealing a history of Bay Area artists, activists, and movements from the 1960s to 2012. This catalog of political posters pays homage to an influential and populist art movement that has created some of the most enduring imagery of our time. In All of Us or None, author Lincoln Cushing examines key selections from a remarkable archive of over 24,000 posters amassed by free speech movement activist, author, and educator Michael Rossman over the course of thirty years. This inspiring collection of Bay Area posters illuminates the history of this ad-hoc and ephemeral art form, celebrating its unique capacity to infuse contemporary issues with the urgency and energy of the eternal fight for justice. Featuring posters on topics as diverse as civil rights, war, poverty, the environment, music, women’s liberation, fine art, and gentrification, All of Us or None shows us why the Bay Area was such fertile breeding ground for the genre and why it arguably produced more independent political posters than anywhere else on earth. Here is an exhilarating history of artists, studios, printshops, distributors, activists, icons, and changemakers—among them R. Crumb, Stanley Mouse, Cesar Chavez, Max Scherr, Emory Douglas, Angela Davis, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Bill Graham, and Pete Seeger—together raising their voices in opposition to the status quo. In spring of 2012, the Oakland Museum of California presented its first comprehensive exhibition of this recently acquired treasure; the show, along with this book, presented an unbroken narrative of passionate social justice printmaking from the mid-1960s to 2012. “This engaging catalogue surveys nearly 300 of the late Michael Rossman’s enormous collection of over 24,000 San Francisco Bay Area social justice posters . . . . With fluid, highly accessible prose, Cushing traces the lineage of images that have now become iconic, such as Frank Cieciorka’s often quoted clenched fist, or the Black Panther Party’s panther symbol as rendered by Emory Douglas and others.” —Publishers Weekly “An extremely remarkable and useful book: remarkable because it brings back so many of the memorable images of rebellion political, cultural, and both together from a past now rapidly receding, and useful because in our new era of protest, creative expression in artistic forms is more badly needed than ever. Lincoln Cushing, a distinguished scholar of political art, has given us a small masterpiece.” —Paul Buhle, publisher of the SDS magazine Radical America and author of more than forty books on radical politics and culture