Papers by Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier
Sights, Sounds and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions, 2024
The chapter explores the justice-environment-activism nexus in the context of the land concession... more The chapter explores the justice-environment-activism nexus in the context of the land concession crisis in Cambodia through a little used prism, namely, that of visuality. It focuses on the confrontation between the authorities and a local environmental activist group called Mother Nature Cambodia, well-known for its efficient video campaigns. This chapter examines the ways in which the government articulates the relationship between law and visuality as a means of hiding elite capture, repressing dissent, and promoting a multi-layered imaginary of development. Then, it analyses Mother Nature Cambodia’s activist counter-visuality as it is expressed in several videos, and it tries to assess its potential impact on the reconfiguration of the space of politics in the country. The chapter aims to contribute to the interdisciplinary discussion of natural resources extraction, neo-patrimonialism, and resistance in Cambodia.
Journal of perpetrator research, Oct 15, 2019
Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History, 2022
In what ways does reenactment challenge the invisibility of genocide? To what extent does genocid... more In what ways does reenactment challenge the invisibility of genocide? To what extent does genocide redefine the potentialities of reenactment? What does reenactment produce in terms of memory, documentation, and social effects? To address these questions, this chapter examines We Want [u] to Know, the participatory movie that director Ella Pugliese made in Cambodia in 2009 in the framework of the outreach activities developed by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Helped by an international team, Pugliese worked in collaboration with the inhabitants of the village of Thnol Lok. This international intervention into the social and memorial fabric of a small community in rural Cambodia shows the entanglement of questions of power with forms of representation. This appears nowhere more critically than in the moments when Thnol Lok villagers restage Khmer Rouge atrocities. This chapter proposes to unpack this complex setup. After situating We Want [u] to Know in relation to other movies about the Cambodian genocide, it looks at notions of catharsis, relief, and traumatisation and the cultural models associated with these notions, especially in the context of transitional justice. Lastly, it explores the question of reenactment in the movie through the ideas of loss and phantasm.
Chapter 22 in Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History, edited by Vanessa Agnew, Julianne Tomann, and Sabine Stach (Routledge, 2022).
On Reenactment: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, 2022
The Win-Win Monument (in the outskirts of Phnom Penh) is a 33 metre high triangular obelisk posed... more The Win-Win Monument (in the outskirts of Phnom Penh) is a 33 metre high triangular obelisk posed on a pentagonal basis adorned with a 117 metre long wall of bas-reliefs which recount half a century of Cambodia’s history through prime minister Hun Sen’s personal story. It includes a museum and a small park that displays military vehicles and planes from the period of the conflict between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge. The whole structure commemorates Hun Sen’s struggles and victories, and Cambodia’s parallel struggles and victories. This chapter takes this entwined celebration of leadership and nation-building as a starting point for exploring the relationship between materiality, agency, and reenactment in Cambodia. More specifically, it considers the way this relationship unfolds in the context of monumentality and memorialisation. I build on Karen Barad’s notion of “posthuman performativity” to unpack this relationship. I investigate the connection between two artefacts, the Win-Win Monument and a documentary movie about Hun Sen, through the idea of “materialist-discursive practices” and their “mutual entailment."
The book On Reenactment, edited by Cristina Baldacci and Susanne Franco, is in open access:
https://books.openedition.org/aaccademia/11990?lang=en
The Journal of Asian Studies
Review of Boreth Ly's book Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in th... more Review of Boreth Ly's book Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (University of Hawaii Press, 2020).
South East Asia Research, 2021
If there is a period in Cambodia’s history that has been overlooked and disparaged, it is certain... more If there is a period in Cambodia’s history that has been overlooked and disparaged, it is certainly the republican one (1970–1975). The Khmer Republic is often viewed as a corrupt, incompetent regime – an interregnum doomed to failure. This article revisits this narrative through currently available written sources. It argues that a cultural approach to the existing records helps us understand how such a negative view, still prevailing today, was discursively constructed. The analysis of the interpretations of a range of protagonists, observers and academics contributes to a critical historiography that might challenge assumptions and clichés about the Republic. This implies a re-working of the ‘republican archive’, a multiform and scattered body that presents a structural imbalance due to the discrepancy between the limited sources coming from the Republic itself and the significant amount of US records. The article reassembles these archival materials. It proposes a different reading of these documents in terms of discipline. It suggests that this might be the first step towards reassessing the Republic and the two dominant themes of that period: the overthrow of head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in 1970 (which marked the end of the monarchy) and the civil war.
Part of the research for this paper was made possible through the COTCA Project, and therefore received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 682081).
International Criminal Law Review, 2022
To this day, the trial of Pol Pot in July 1997 in Anlong Veng remains an underexplored topic, pos... more To this day, the trial of Pol Pot in July 1997 in Anlong Veng remains an underexplored topic, possibly because it is seen as a parody of justice organised by a rival Khmer Rouge faction. Images of the event show an old and fragile man who has to be supported by guards to the meeting hall. Drawing on anthropologist Ashley Thompson’s study of the ‘substitute body of the king’, the paper examines the corporeal strategies at play in the trial and in the display and cremation of Pol Pot’s body in April 1998. Using a range of materials (articles in media, pictures, videos, and artworks), it brings into conversation ‘forensic aesthetics’, performance theory, and contemporary visual arts to investigate the role of Pol Pot’s body as a political tool in the troubled context of post-transition Cambodia.
Part of the research for this paper was made possible through the COTCA Project, and therefore received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 682081).
Journal of Perpetrator Research
H ow do mass criminals die? What do we do with their corpses? How does the perpetrator's death af... more H ow do mass criminals die? What do we do with their corpses? How does the perpetrator's death affect society at large? These questions are not new, but the death in the past decade of Idi Amin Dada, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Mouammar Gaddafi, and Ieng Sary makes them highly topical. Yet, they remain under-theorized, a 'taboo within a taboo', as the editor of La Mort du Bourreau, Sévane Garibian, argues in her introduction to the book (p. 25). Of course, damnatio memoriae and martyrology have long been studied in different disciplines, starting with archaeology and anthropology. However, they have not made their way yet into the specific realm of man-made mass violence. Academics who work at the intersection of body studies and genocide studies usually focus on the victims. Recent years have brought a growing number of studies on aspects as diverse as body count, exhumation and forensics, evidence, rituals and re-interring, political and social uses of the victims' remains in the aftermath of massacres. 1 So far, perpetrator studies has paid more attention to living perpetrators than dead ones-a tropism which reflects to some extent the fascination in the public with the mass murderer's psychology and intimate life (p. 25). Confessions and testimonies are a source of information on the crimes themselves, the individual process of radicalization, the role of ideology, social circumstances, and peer pressure. There are, obviously, some studies on the perpetrator's body, but much work is still to be done on this topic. 2 La Mort du Bourreau, thus, fills a gap. Garibian defines three areas of inquiry: 1 See for instance the research conducted by anthropologists Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marie Dreyfus in the framework of the European research program Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide, and the affiliated interdisciplinary journal Human Remains and Violence; see also, Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights, ed.
Formen und Facetten, 2000
Sociedades En Crisis Europa Y El Concepto De Estetica 2011 Isbn 978 84 8181 500 9 Pags 302 312, 2011
Making Histories, 2020
Chapter in the book 'Making Histories' edited by Paul Ashton, Tanya Evans and Paula Hamilton (Ber... more Chapter in the book 'Making Histories' edited by Paul Ashton, Tanya Evans and Paula Hamilton (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter).
Travel blogs form a substantial part of the material about Khmer Rouge atrocities that circulates on the Internet. Far from being a marginal phenomenon, these blogs are often used by people who try to understand Cambodia’s past (especially people who intend to travel to Cambodia). Blogs enable a “greater degree of participation in public history making”, Stephanie Ho argues (Ho 2007). How does this participation materialise when people address a faraway and generally little-known history? This chapter explores the relation of digital media, public history-making and the memorialisation of the Khmer Rouge period (1975–1979). It analyzes the historical knowledge about the Cambodian genocide produced and shared by people via travel blogs and the extent to which these blogs help build non-institutional historiographies of Khmer Rouge memorials. To do so, it focuses on a specific kind of travel blogs, those of backpackers. Backpackers tend to dismiss ‘packaged tourism’. They see themselves as more ethical, responsible and independent – in other words, more ‘morally conscious’ – than ‘normal’ tourists. How does this in turn shape their production of historical knowledge? Does it mean that they are able to to look at things differently? Is there some connection between their choice of an ‘alternative’ way of life, the way Khmer Rouge memorials are visited and how they understand Cambodia’s history?
Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2019
This article explores the use of photographic portraits of Khmer Rouge perpetrators in Cambodia' ... more This article explores the use of photographic portraits of Khmer Rouge perpetrators in Cambodia' s public sphere today. It is often said that the Democratic Kampuchea regime was faceless. Hidden behind the façade of the Angkar (the Organization), the Khmer Rouge leaders engaged in limited personality cult, thereby remaining invisible to the major part of the Cambodian population during their years in power. What happens then when ‘evil’ is given a face, or rather specific faces? How does the former ‘invisibility’ of senior Khmer Rouge shape the later reception of their public image? To what extent do the photographic portraits of mass murderers provide socially accepted forms of emotional release for victims in particular and for society in general? Is it possible to go beyond affect and use such photos as tools of information and education about genocide and accountability? How do media, especially social media, contribute to these processes? To answer these questions, I look at a selected set of examples: the exhibition ‘Genocide: Who are the Senior Khmer Rouge Leaders to be Judged? The Importance of Case 002’, organized by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum; the graffiti-covered photos of Khmer Rouge leaders and guards displayed at Tuol Sleng; and the Dartboard Game action performed in Phnom Penh’s public space by the Association of Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia (AKRVC) in 2011 and 2012.
Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2019
The roundtable 'Double Exposures, Double Takes' discusses 'perpetrator photography', or rather th... more The roundtable 'Double Exposures, Double Takes' discusses 'perpetrator photography', or rather the relation between the two terms, in a range of context. As a starting point for the conversation, the contributors (Rabiaa Benlahbib, Wulandani Dirgantoro, Kobi Kabalek and Zuzanna Dizuban, Lovro Kralj, Tjebbe van Tijen) were proposed to discuss a photo that shows a promotional poster for Swiss artists Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger's exhibition 'Double Takes' in C/O Amerika Haus in Berlin (spring 2019). The poster was based on one of the artists' 'Icons' images, a reframing of the notorious Hooded Man picture (Abu Ghraib).
Cinema & Cie 30, ‘Reinventing Mao: Maoisms and national cinemas’, edited by Marco Dalla Gassa, Corrado Neri, and Federico Zecca, 2018
By 1978, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia engaged in a limited ‘open door’ policy under the pre... more By 1978, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia engaged in a limited ‘open door’ policy under the pressure of its Chinese ally. The country had been carefully sealed off thus far, but in need of a more positive image abroad, the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea invited journalists from friendly countries and representatives from Western Maoist organisations. These visitors filmed their journey in Cambodia in order to show the international public what the Khmer Rouge had achieved economically and socially within a few years. The paper examines two of the resulting productions: Kampučija 1978 (Kampuchea 1978, 1978) by Yugoslav film director Nikola Vitorović and Democratic Kampuchea (Demokratiska Kampuchea, 1978) by Swedish writer Jan Myrdal. Drawing on anthropologist Faye Ginsburg’s application of the notion of ‘parallax effect’, it compares the two works with Khmer Rouge propaganda movies. It proposes to investigate through an ethnographic lens the articulation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ performed in these films, and the way ideology both shaped and challenged forms of solidarity and identification. It argues that the ‘parallax effect’ enables a more nuanced view of the filmic representation of Democratic Kampuchea in the years 1975-1978, far from the monolithic perception people may have of it today.
Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 2018
(text in open access on Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 32/2).
The story-sharing website for am... more (text in open access on Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 32/2).
The story-sharing website for amateur and professional writers Wattpad offers over a thousand stories about the Holocaust. Most are romances revolving around the same plot, the impossible love of a Jewish woman and a Nazi man. This article proposes to take a closer look at this “bad writing,” as scholar Berel Lang describes sentimental and cliché literature about the Holocaust. The stories on Wattpad raise many questions about the transmission of Holocaust memory through literature in the post-survivor and digital age. To what extent do these stories qualify as Holocaust writing? What role does the Holocaust as historical event play in these texts? What do the stories say about the popular representations through which Holocaust memory is passed down to younger generations? To answer these questions, the article examines a set of 65 stories selected for their size, popularity, and plot. Drawing on studies of romantic literature, Holocaust literature scholarship (including children’s literature), and media studies, it explores the narrative structures, characters, and settings of the stories and tries to understand their impact on readers in terms of gender construction and confrontation with the past. Then, the article analyzes the relation of history, fiction, and writing that materializes in these Holocaust romances, and the specific environment provided by the online platform for the formation of communities around questions of writing, popular culture, and emotions. Following Lang’s suggestion that bad writing may also have “good effects,” the article positively assesses the impact of the Holocaust texts emerging from digital participatory culture.
Memoires en Jeu/Memories at Stake, 2018
Special issue edited by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier, Anne-Laure Porée, and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca... more Special issue edited by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier, Anne-Laure Porée, and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca:
"The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh will soon commemorate the fortieth anniversary of its founding. Established in the premises of the Khmer Rouge prison S.21 in 1979, right after the downfall of the Pol Pot regime, it has become over the years the main site of memory of the Cambodian Genocide, represented in numerous books, documentary movies, exhibitions, works of art, and social media. This special issue of Mémoires en Jeu revisits the history of Tuol Sleng with the idea to shed a new light on it; it proposes a multidisciplinary perspective on the site, bringing together interviews and analyses by specialists who reflect on the role and transformation of the museum in the context of memorial and socio-political transition in Cambodia; it aims to open up new debates with regards to the artifacts, images, and conceptual frameworks by which the memorialization and historical knowledge of Khmer Rouge crimes are processed nowadays."
Jüdischer Widerstand in Europa (1933-1945) , 2016
In 1977 the art historian and critic Douglas Crimp organized the exhibition 'Pictures' in New Yor... more In 1977 the art historian and critic Douglas Crimp organized the exhibition 'Pictures' in New York. There he presented Troy Brauntuch’s '1 2 3', an installation that consisted of photographic enlargements of drawings Hitler had made before the First World War. Going back on the show two years later in the article 'Pictures' (art journal October no. 8, 1979) Crimp stresses again the ordinariness of the original sketches. He adds then a striking comment: “Perhaps even more surprising than the banality of Hitler’s paintings is that of the art produced inside the concentration camps,” referring to the exhibition 'Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940-1945' held at the Jewish Museum of New York in 1978. What is surprising indeed is that an art historian such as Crimp, early proponent of cultural studies, dismisses so easily the biography and experience of the artists presented in Spiritual Resistance. Some were born in the 1870s, others in the 1910s. They came from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Ukraine, Belgium. Some were self-taught artists, others had studied with Rodin and Matisse, exhibited with Picasso and Mondriaan. That Crimp subsumes under an overall “banality” such a diversity of backgrounds, and consequently of artistic renderings of the Nazi terror, says a lot. It illustrates how difficult it is to reflect art-historically on sketches, drawings and paintings produced in the extreme conditions of ghettos and camps. Artistic representations of Jewish resistance, at the same time evidence of crime, historical document, object of memory, are situated at the limits –conceptual, epistemological– of the discipline. My paper explores this conflicted relation between art history and the art of Jewish resistance as it has developed from the late 1970s onward. It examines how the re-encoding of "spiritual resistance'" (the term was coined by the Holocaust survivor and curator of the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum Miriam Novitch in the 1950s) into "Holocaust art" has affected the understanding of Jewish resistance over the past decades. It analyzes how changes in the practice of art history, namely the postmodern shift from "art" to "visual" and "history" to "culture" (Hal Foster, 'The Archive Without Museum' in October no. 77, 1996), reflect on the idea of Jewish resistance in a twofold way – the images mediating it and the ways of reading/seeing these images. Last, it asks how these transformations relate to the formation of the cultural memory of the Holocaust.
How do people view or review Holocaust video testimonies via social networks? To what extent do ... more How do people view or review Holocaust video testimonies via social networks? To what extent do social media affect both the nature of Holocaust testimony as category and the notion of witnessing/bearing witness? The objective of the paper is to give an overview of the complex environment formed by digital remediation. Focusing on Google videos, YouTube, and Instagram, the paper explores four aspects of Holocaust testimony in social media. The first part looks at the manipulation of video testimonies in support to Holocaust denial. The second part examines the debates that emerge out of the interaction of users/viewers among themselves and with the posted testimonies. The third part analyzes the transposition into social networks of the physical encounter with Holocaust survivors. The fourth part and conclusion reflects more tentatively on the possibility to use social media materials as sources for a visual history of Holocaust testimony.
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Papers by Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier
Chapter 22 in Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History, edited by Vanessa Agnew, Julianne Tomann, and Sabine Stach (Routledge, 2022).
The book On Reenactment, edited by Cristina Baldacci and Susanne Franco, is in open access:
https://books.openedition.org/aaccademia/11990?lang=en
Part of the research for this paper was made possible through the COTCA Project, and therefore received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 682081).
Part of the research for this paper was made possible through the COTCA Project, and therefore received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 682081).
Travel blogs form a substantial part of the material about Khmer Rouge atrocities that circulates on the Internet. Far from being a marginal phenomenon, these blogs are often used by people who try to understand Cambodia’s past (especially people who intend to travel to Cambodia). Blogs enable a “greater degree of participation in public history making”, Stephanie Ho argues (Ho 2007). How does this participation materialise when people address a faraway and generally little-known history? This chapter explores the relation of digital media, public history-making and the memorialisation of the Khmer Rouge period (1975–1979). It analyzes the historical knowledge about the Cambodian genocide produced and shared by people via travel blogs and the extent to which these blogs help build non-institutional historiographies of Khmer Rouge memorials. To do so, it focuses on a specific kind of travel blogs, those of backpackers. Backpackers tend to dismiss ‘packaged tourism’. They see themselves as more ethical, responsible and independent – in other words, more ‘morally conscious’ – than ‘normal’ tourists. How does this in turn shape their production of historical knowledge? Does it mean that they are able to to look at things differently? Is there some connection between their choice of an ‘alternative’ way of life, the way Khmer Rouge memorials are visited and how they understand Cambodia’s history?
The story-sharing website for amateur and professional writers Wattpad offers over a thousand stories about the Holocaust. Most are romances revolving around the same plot, the impossible love of a Jewish woman and a Nazi man. This article proposes to take a closer look at this “bad writing,” as scholar Berel Lang describes sentimental and cliché literature about the Holocaust. The stories on Wattpad raise many questions about the transmission of Holocaust memory through literature in the post-survivor and digital age. To what extent do these stories qualify as Holocaust writing? What role does the Holocaust as historical event play in these texts? What do the stories say about the popular representations through which Holocaust memory is passed down to younger generations? To answer these questions, the article examines a set of 65 stories selected for their size, popularity, and plot. Drawing on studies of romantic literature, Holocaust literature scholarship (including children’s literature), and media studies, it explores the narrative structures, characters, and settings of the stories and tries to understand their impact on readers in terms of gender construction and confrontation with the past. Then, the article analyzes the relation of history, fiction, and writing that materializes in these Holocaust romances, and the specific environment provided by the online platform for the formation of communities around questions of writing, popular culture, and emotions. Following Lang’s suggestion that bad writing may also have “good effects,” the article positively assesses the impact of the Holocaust texts emerging from digital participatory culture.
"The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh will soon commemorate the fortieth anniversary of its founding. Established in the premises of the Khmer Rouge prison S.21 in 1979, right after the downfall of the Pol Pot regime, it has become over the years the main site of memory of the Cambodian Genocide, represented in numerous books, documentary movies, exhibitions, works of art, and social media. This special issue of Mémoires en Jeu revisits the history of Tuol Sleng with the idea to shed a new light on it; it proposes a multidisciplinary perspective on the site, bringing together interviews and analyses by specialists who reflect on the role and transformation of the museum in the context of memorial and socio-political transition in Cambodia; it aims to open up new debates with regards to the artifacts, images, and conceptual frameworks by which the memorialization and historical knowledge of Khmer Rouge crimes are processed nowadays."
Chapter 22 in Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History, edited by Vanessa Agnew, Julianne Tomann, and Sabine Stach (Routledge, 2022).
The book On Reenactment, edited by Cristina Baldacci and Susanne Franco, is in open access:
https://books.openedition.org/aaccademia/11990?lang=en
Part of the research for this paper was made possible through the COTCA Project, and therefore received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 682081).
Part of the research for this paper was made possible through the COTCA Project, and therefore received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 682081).
Travel blogs form a substantial part of the material about Khmer Rouge atrocities that circulates on the Internet. Far from being a marginal phenomenon, these blogs are often used by people who try to understand Cambodia’s past (especially people who intend to travel to Cambodia). Blogs enable a “greater degree of participation in public history making”, Stephanie Ho argues (Ho 2007). How does this participation materialise when people address a faraway and generally little-known history? This chapter explores the relation of digital media, public history-making and the memorialisation of the Khmer Rouge period (1975–1979). It analyzes the historical knowledge about the Cambodian genocide produced and shared by people via travel blogs and the extent to which these blogs help build non-institutional historiographies of Khmer Rouge memorials. To do so, it focuses on a specific kind of travel blogs, those of backpackers. Backpackers tend to dismiss ‘packaged tourism’. They see themselves as more ethical, responsible and independent – in other words, more ‘morally conscious’ – than ‘normal’ tourists. How does this in turn shape their production of historical knowledge? Does it mean that they are able to to look at things differently? Is there some connection between their choice of an ‘alternative’ way of life, the way Khmer Rouge memorials are visited and how they understand Cambodia’s history?
The story-sharing website for amateur and professional writers Wattpad offers over a thousand stories about the Holocaust. Most are romances revolving around the same plot, the impossible love of a Jewish woman and a Nazi man. This article proposes to take a closer look at this “bad writing,” as scholar Berel Lang describes sentimental and cliché literature about the Holocaust. The stories on Wattpad raise many questions about the transmission of Holocaust memory through literature in the post-survivor and digital age. To what extent do these stories qualify as Holocaust writing? What role does the Holocaust as historical event play in these texts? What do the stories say about the popular representations through which Holocaust memory is passed down to younger generations? To answer these questions, the article examines a set of 65 stories selected for their size, popularity, and plot. Drawing on studies of romantic literature, Holocaust literature scholarship (including children’s literature), and media studies, it explores the narrative structures, characters, and settings of the stories and tries to understand their impact on readers in terms of gender construction and confrontation with the past. Then, the article analyzes the relation of history, fiction, and writing that materializes in these Holocaust romances, and the specific environment provided by the online platform for the formation of communities around questions of writing, popular culture, and emotions. Following Lang’s suggestion that bad writing may also have “good effects,” the article positively assesses the impact of the Holocaust texts emerging from digital participatory culture.
"The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh will soon commemorate the fortieth anniversary of its founding. Established in the premises of the Khmer Rouge prison S.21 in 1979, right after the downfall of the Pol Pot regime, it has become over the years the main site of memory of the Cambodian Genocide, represented in numerous books, documentary movies, exhibitions, works of art, and social media. This special issue of Mémoires en Jeu revisits the history of Tuol Sleng with the idea to shed a new light on it; it proposes a multidisciplinary perspective on the site, bringing together interviews and analyses by specialists who reflect on the role and transformation of the museum in the context of memorial and socio-political transition in Cambodia; it aims to open up new debates with regards to the artifacts, images, and conceptual frameworks by which the memorialization and historical knowledge of Khmer Rouge crimes are processed nowadays."
Panel organizers: Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier & Kimberley Weir
Aligning itself with the fields of posthumanism, environmental humanities and critical area studies, this panel aims to explore the interrelatedness of genocide, ecocide, and 'cosmocide' (Sony Labou Tansi 1973) in Southeast Asia. There has been much focus on the impact of colonial and postcolonial violence on people but less examination, however, of the ways in which it connects with the effect of this violence on environments, places, sentient beings, and entities. As literature scholar Rob Nixon has shown in his seminal book Slow Violence (2011), violence unfolds and persists at different scales and throughout different temporalities. This continuum is best captured by the idea of 'natureculture' (Haraway 2003), a term that both illuminates the entangled relations of the human and the nonhuman and recontextualizes multispecies interdependency. By suggesting 'naturecultural' histories of violence as a framework, we seek to shed light on the linkages between past forms of domination and environmentality and present-day practices of extraction and socioeconomic exploitation in Southeast Asia. The lens through which we propose to explore these issues is the visual.
The first part of my presentation deals with the new media economy in which the miniseries Holocaust is being integrated. Years ago, in an early analysis of the cyber-memory of Nazi atrocities, the media scholar Anna Reading stressed the need of understanding “the tension between the Holocaust and the commercial software that tells its story” (2001, 330). Following her advice, I explore the connective and visual environment YouTube provides for Holocaust and its effect on the viewer’s relation to the miniseries: forms of re-mediation (as four full-length episodes, chopped up to avoid copyright issues, or as fragments disconnected from the narrative whole); associated videos (documentary movies about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, survivor testimonies of the Fortunoff archives, interviews featuring Meryl Streep); impact of number of views, ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’; interference of advertisements (to be clicked away) appearing at the beginning of videos.
The second part of the presentation deals with the participatory culture that develops around Holocaust. My analysis of user comments focuses on two major themes. The first concerns changes in popular tastes: on the basis of comments about fiction vs. documentary, storyline and characters, and film aesthetics, I assess how people interpret today the issues of trivialization (Wiesel 1978) and banalization that were central when the miniseries was aired. The second theme concerns the formation of memory and identity politics around the Holocaust: drawing on the notion of ‘politics of platforms’ coined by Tarleton Gillespie (2010), I examine the articulation of hate speech and counter arguments, and try to understand how they connect to users’ background.
The presentation centers on the epistemological and performative functions of YouTube as a new form of ‘television’ that is critical to the present-day transmission of the Holocaust.
Following a chronological order, I explore the successive political environments in which visual documents have been produced and interpreted. This structure aims to highlight changes in the identity of stakeholders involved in memorializing and writing the history of Democratic Kampuchea, and the corresponding narratives developed in the process. I examine how these changes relate to:
the transition of Cambodia from socialist republic to multi-party constitutional monarchy, from war-torn to post-conflict society; shifts in the ideological and moral economy in which Khmer Rouge atrocities are perceived; large-scale transformations in technologies and paradigms that mediate stories of mass violence.
The material analyzed includes: documentary films, drawings, exhibitions, photographs, memorials, and digital/social media. This range enables to assess how mediums affect the circulation and presentation of artifacts, and the formats of perception and understanding. This opens to further methodological issues in terms of specificity of the material studied and its interaction with verbal documents.
I examine the origins, intentions, uses, styles, genres, and audiences of the selected visual sources. I look at both the original context of production and reception of images and the “afterlife” of these images as they are mediated and interpreted anew in different geographical, institutional, and cultural environments.
References to the Nazi genocide in the depiction of Khmer Rouge atrocities, far from being a recent trend, began as soon as Democratic Kampuchea (as the country was called during Pol Pot's reign) collapsed in 1979. Western journalists supporting Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia called the infamous prison Tuol Sleng –where the Khmer Rouge political police had killed thousands of Cambodians– an “Asian Auschwitz”. It was a view that the newly-established authorities, the socialist People's Republic of Kampuchea, were all too eager to implement since it allowed them to play down the Marxist-Leninist credentials of the former regime, thus to appear “legitimate” at home and abroad. In today's “multi-party” Kingdom of Cambodia, references to the Holocaust still dictate sites and practices of remembrance and shape interpretations of the events. However, what has been long repressed, namely colonial and Cold War narratives, emerges anew as questions of agency, national identity, and relation to the West re-surface in the context of global economics.
My paper explores such an interaction of Holocaust tropes with regional narratives in the documentary representation of justice (i.e. Khmer Rouge Tribunal). It focuses on two sets of work, in both cases made by survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime:
-Filmmaker Rithy Panh's interviews of Tuol Sleng's commander Duch (Trial Case 001): Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (movie, 2011) and L'Elimination (book co-written with Christophe Bataille, 2011);
-Journalist Thet Sambath's interviews of Nuon Chea, the ideologist of Democratic Kampuchea (Trial Case 002): Enemies of the People, (movie co-directed with Rob Lemkin, 2009) and Behind the Killing Fields (book co-written with Gina Chon, 2011).
My paper examines how these works represent liability, the relationship between interviewer/victim and perpetrator, forms of memory (e.g. role of the body, function of photographic evidence), and historiographic processes at play in narrativizing the Khmer Rouge period.
My paper aims to question these categories of aesthetic experience within the particular field of representation of historical trauma (which Rancière places at the core of the ethical turn of contemporary art). It examines the transposition into the post-colonial environment of issues and debates that had been hitherto raised within the Euro-American context and in relation to the Holocaust: How to conceive aesthetic experience in the face of catastrophe? Does bearing witness to extermination require different, new forms of the aesthetic? It is not only our relationship to the tragic legacy of the twentieth century that is at stake but also the way we experience today’s ‘precariousness’ (Hal Foster): post-Cold War, ‘war on terror’, nationalist and ethnic conflicts, economic crisis, migration, resurgence of xenophobic discourses and policies in many European countries.
Artists, curators, art critics have been most concerned with those issues over the past years. Projects and exhibitions dealing with traumatic historical events have multiplied worldwide – a phenomenon that can be related, among other factors, to the emergence of new artistic centers on the map, the growth of mobility-facilitating structures (e.g. artist-in-residence, travel grants, biennalization), and a ‘return’ to engaged artistic practices. Such ‘oxymoric popularity of trauma’ (as Susannah Radstone so aptly puts it) in the art world makes it legitimate to wonder whether a ‘trans-national’ aesthetic experience is emerging and what forms it might take on.
Through a set of examples, my paper looks at the aesthetic experience artworks engage the spectator with in front of images of atrocity. It examines the influence of technological and societal developments (e.g. electronic and digital media, multiculturalism, human rights, consumerism) on the formation of aesthetic categories and their interaction with previously formulated concepts: anti-aesthetic (Hal Foster et al.), non-aesthetic, and ‘inaesthetic’ (Alain Badiou).
Almost ten years later, such familiarity is hardly a surprise. The black-and-white mug shots of S-21 victims as well as Tuol Sleng facilities and permanent display (building, cells, paintings of survivor Vann Nath, torture instruments) have become iconic images of the Khmer Rouge-led Cambodian genocide. Remediated in a variety of settings -from television and printed news to artworks, from book covers to weblogs- they have been, and are being, circulated across borders.
Drawing on the Cambodian genocide case, my paper asks how electronic connectivity contributes to the trans-cultural memorialisation of historical traumatic events. It focuses on the representation of Tuol Sleng on a specific instance of web memorial mediation: Flickr, the well-known online photo management and sharing application for amateur and professional photographers .
My paper examines to which extent the aesthetics produced and conveyed through such digital sharing reflects new forms of identification and formation of communities. Visual archive in progress, Flickr proves a realm where documentary and aesthetic functions, tropes for memory and tropes for photography, individual and collective perceptions are articulated anew. To understand how these articulations are performed, my paper looks at the representational patterns in picture-making; the textual content (captioning and comments); the interfaces (photostream, tags, pools) through which Tuol Sleng is inserted into other constellations of meaning.
Referring to the concept of “prosthetic memory”, the last part of my paper reflects upon the relationship between the actual and digital Tuol Sleng. Can we ‘visit’ Tuol Sleng, as site of mass death and memorial museum, via Flickr? Is it possible to digitally render the physical, ‘authentic’, bodily experienced encounter with the place? Does Flickr de-materialize Tuol Sleng, fragment the memory embodied in the buildings and artefacts? My paper looks at trans-cultural memorialization as both contribution and challenge to the commodification of Tuol Sleng within the context of “dark tourism”.
The book includes contributions by: Judy Ledgerwood, Hang Nisay, Daniel Bultmann, Anne-Laure Porée, Rachel Hughes, Rafal Pankowski, Christina Ullrich, Barbara Thimm, Magali-An Berthon and Julia Brennan, Bridie Shepherd, Helen Jarvis, Julie Fleischman, Helen Worsnop, Caroline Laurent, Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier, Rithy Panh, and Caroline Bennett.