This thesis is about the relationship between place, memory and geopolitics. It examines public memorial sites in Cambodia dedicated to the victims of the genocide of 1975 to 1979. Scant attention has been paid to the geographies of Cambodia’s post-1979 reconstruction period. Where commentators have noted the existence of Cambodia’s dedicated spaces of memory they have characterised these sites as culturally and politically inauthentic or marginal (as ersatz religious monuments, or as political ‘propaganda’). Against these accounts, I contend that Cambodia’ s memorials are central to, and productive of, cultural, national and transnational politics of the past and present. Like many other late twentieth-century contexts, the Cambodian case demonstrates the link between the texts and practices of geopolitics and discourses of traumatic memory. The dissertation examines how various tropes of memory enact an imaginative topography of Cambodia, both locally and transnationally. I do this by analysing four memorial sites and practices: the development of the Choeung Ek ‘killing field’ site (Phnom Penh); tourism to Cambodia’s genocide sites as a popular geopolitical practice; and the global circulation and reception of photographs of Khmer Rouge victims. It is argued that these sites and practices of memory have been central to Cambodia’s redevelopment as well as constitutive of the geopolitics of Cambodia’s e-entry into an international state system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245296 |
| Creators | Hughes, Rachel Bethany |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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