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Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 3, Pages 259–287

“No, I Can’t Forget”: Performance and Memory in Dengue Fever’s Cambodian America

Joshua Chambers-Letson Northwestern University

During an Echo Park concert to promote their 2008 album Venus on Earth, Los Angeles-based indie rock band Dengue Fever made their way through a boisterous set in their home town before a mixed crowd of Angeleno hipsters and intergenerational Cambodian American immigrants. During the performance, the band’s five multi-ethnic American male instrumentalists performed their roles with playful abandon. In turn, lead singer Chhom Nimol, a twenty-something Cambodian American émigré, held down the concert—her voice leaping through sonic hoops in both Khmer and English. In the final moments, voice shaking and a few tears streaming down her cheeks, Chhom lit a candle onstage in commemoration of the victims of the Khmer Rouge. In this surprising setting, a war that most Americans forget, or know nothing of to begin with, slipped into the room in the hands of a pop singer (Figure 1). Formed in 2001, Dengue Fever performs covers of, and music influenced by, classic Cambodian rock songs from a musical subculture that flourished in Phnom Penh during the sixties and seventies. This rock scene was threatened with near erasure when life in Cambodia was radically altered by four years of tyrannical rule by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK, popularly known as the Khmer Rouge), which began in April 1975. In the years following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, this music has seen a significant revival both within Cambodia and its diaspora. With four studio albums, a documentary, and a global touring history, Dengue Fever builds upon the revival of this tradition for familiar audiences and introduces the music to new fans in Asia, North America, and Europe. Singing in two languages (Khmer and English) and across a range of cultural traditions, Dengue Fever’s performance aesthetic shuttles between the past and the present as well as between the United States and Cambodia.

Performing a catalogue of music nearly lost to history, Dengue Fever enacts a performance of cultural memory with significant political and historical implications. Amnesia and obfuscated memory play a key role

C© 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Figure 1: Dengue Fever, 2011. Photo: Lauren Dukoff.

in the construction of life for Cambodians and the Cambodian diaspora in the post-Khmer Rouge era. In the following essay, I argue that national amnesia about the overlapping histories between Cambodia and the United States regularly colludes with law and policy to produce a range of injustices for Cambodians and Cambodian Americans. From legislative imperatives producing patterns of Cambodian migration in the 1980s to forms of neoliberal welfare reform and the national security policies born of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), US law plays a significant role in determining which parts of US involvement in Cambodian history the nation is willing to officially remember, and which parts it places under erasure. As a result, many Cambodian Americans are placed in a precarious position within the United States, often shuttling between recognition and erasure.

Performing across cultural and national borders, while staging music from a forgotten past, Dengue Fever offers us an entry point into this set of commonly elided histories. The erasure of such histories continues to play a detrimental role in the lives of Cambodians and Cambodian Americans. By performing the repurposed scraps of a forgotten past, Dengue Fever subtly invites its audiences to engage with, interrogate, and even challenge the

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politics of amnesia that have affected Cambodia and Cambodian America from the Vietnam War era to the present. Taking up this invitation, I will trace the politics of performing memory in Cambodian America through an assessment of Dengue Fever’s performance practice. I will consider the implications of such a performance of memory as it pertains to the oft- forgotten victims of the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge era. I will then show how Dengue Fever performs in such a way that allows an audience to consider the ways in which the legacy of this elided history is made manifest in a set of new wars that disproportionately affect immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States—aka, the GWOT.

The Politics of Remembering Cambodia Before turning to the role of memory in the performance practice of

Dengue Fever, it is worth rehearsing the elided histories engaged by their work. The production of Cambodian America as a significant population in the United States is paradoxically linked to law and policy deployed to obscure public memory of US intervention in Cambodia. Given the significant violence inflicted on Cambodia during the Cambodia Campaign of the Vietnam War, it is particularly poignant that the history of Cambodia is virtually absent from public memory in the United States.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon authorized the US military to begin strategic bombing strikes within Cambodian borders in order to target Vietnamese troops suspected of operating within Eastern Cambodia. This same year, the State Department played a tacit role in militarist Lon Nol’s coup against the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, resulting in the establishment of a brutal dictatorial regime (Becker 112). US support for the unpopular Lon Nol regime and the continued bombings in the provinces became a primary source of propaganda used by the Communist rebels, dubbed the “Khmer Rouge” by Sihanouk, to turn public sentiment against Lon Nol and recruit troops to their cause. The bombardment of Cambodia ended in 1973, when Congress halted President Nixon’s aggression in the region, but only after 150,000 innocent Cambodian civilians were dead, with countless more wounded and displaced from their homes and villages.

The sudden abandonment of Cambodia produced a massive power vacuum in the country, allowing the CPK to overtake Lon Nol’s Republican Army, gaining control of the state and nearly every aspect of Cambodian life. Renamed Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the tragedies Cambodia sustained

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under the CPK are well known and too complex to explain here.1 Briefly summarized, in a matter of hours after claiming victory, the CPK transformed the entire nation into a labor camp. As part of its revolutionary program, the CPK set out to destroy the cultural, social, and political history of the previous regime and isolate Cambodia from the rest of the world (with the partial exception of China). From 1975 to 1979 between one and two million of Cambodia’s five-million person population died.2 Ethnic minorities like the Cham, Thai, and Vietnamese, and social groups including former Lon Nol government officials, monks, intellectuals, and artists were all at particular risk for elimination.

From 1979 on, US policy toward Cambodia was mercurial and comprised of calculated acts of repression, short-term memory, and enforced amnesia. The Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations all took the official position that DK was a puppet of the Vietnamese government while quietly tolerating the Khmer Rouge in deference to a fragile new relationship with China.3 The US government denied reports of atrocities coming from Cambodia during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, characterizing the immediate recall of refugees pouring across the Thai border as simple propaganda. When former Khmer Rouge rebels—backed by the Vietnamese—ousted the CPK in 1979, the United States made a quick about- face and threw its official support behind an anti-occupation coalition that included Sihanouk and, most importantly, the Khmer Rouge. As such, the United States played a key role in keeping the Khmer Rouge government-in- exile as the diplomatically recognized government of Cambodia at the United Nations until 1991. Helping to maintain diplomatic recognition of the Khmer Rouge as a government-in-exile, the United States hampered international efforts to bring aid to Cambodia during the Vietnamese occupation, to bring Khmer Rouge leaders to justice, or to assist in the reconstruction process following the Khmer Rouge collapse.4 To this day, the US government is reticent to acknowledge its role in the series of crises that have rocked Cambodia since 1975. Similarly, Cambodian attempts to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice, as well as attempts to document and memorialize the events of the period are frequently met with resistance from a government largely populated by former Khmer Rouge cadre (including Prime Minister Hun Sen) who would be embarrassed to see their role in this history come to light. Thus, as scholar of modern Cambodian history Ben Kiernan observes, in Cambodia and the United States, “both the creation of historical memory and its erasure depend upon contemporary politics as much as history itself ” (Genocide and Resistance 237).

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The performance of memory, under such conditions, takes on a directly political dimension. If the violence inflicted upon a range of Asian nations by the US government and military is often officially elided, various Asian Americanist theorists have shown that Asian-American cultural acts can deploy memory to combat such erasures.5 In an environment where political and diplomatic interests commandeer public memory, the officially forgotten injustices caused by both the Vietnam War and DK periods continue to haunt Cambodian America. People such as dancer and Khmer Rouge survivor Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, scholar and survivor Boreth Ly, and activist playwright Catherine Filloux, have argued that aesthetic performances of memory may play a vital role in providing redress for survivors of the Khmer Rouge era and its aftermath.6 As I will argue later, musical performance plays a central role in this process because of the erasure of traditional and modern Cambodian musical traditions as a result of the CPK’s violent cultural policies. Performances of memory within this context are marked by a political power that insists on acknowledging erased histories while challenging the forms of subjection that occurred through the official acts of amnesia enacted by both the Khmer Rouge regime and (albeit to radically different effect) US law and policy.

Orientalist Nostalgia: Staging the Native Informant When a pair of Jewish American siblings, Ethan and Zac Holtzman,

set out to form Dengue Fever, the search for a Cambodian front woman was synonymous with a search for an ethnic subject who would authenticate the band’s cultural appropriation of Cambodian music. Initially this search inadvertently reified the opposition of gendered, racial, and national subject positions, rather than destabilizing them. Chhom performs as a kind of “native informant,” a figure who moves between and translates across discrete temporal, cultural, and national subject positions. In shuttling between these distinct spaces, however, Chhom’s performance destabilizes them. Dengue Fever’s nostalgic performances draw a forgotten past into a volatile present and blur the boundaries constructed between the United States and Cambodia by this wall of amnesia.

My deployment of the term “native informant” is drawn from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s appropriation of an ethnographic term that designates a subject who stands between the Western ethnographer and the space of inquiry central to the ethnographer’s research. For Spivak, the native informant serves as a bridge to the exterior limit against which the proper

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Western subject (philosophical, literary, historical, cultural and, I would add, legal) emerges. Blurring the boundaries between socially constructed temporal, cultural, national, and racial spaces, the native informant has the capacity to challenge discrete categories such as inside and outside, East and West, past and present, or Asian and American. Considered thus, the native information is simultaneously produced through the subjection and foreclosure of ethnic difference as she performs across various cultural, racial, and national borders in a fashion that threatens their stability.

During a millennial vacation to Cambodia, Ethan Holtzman was exposed to the vibrant pre-DK rock scene, which had been populated by musicians such as legendary singers Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Pan Ron, and Yol Aularong (discussed below). On returning to the United States, Holtzman, with his brother Zac, set out to create a band that would reinvigorate the sound of pre-DK Cambodian rock from the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. At a loss for a lead singer, the group sought out a Cambodian front-woman, holding auditions in Long Beach Night Clubs with disappointing results until they encountered Chhom Nimol.

Chhom Nimol came to the United States from Cambodia in 2000. Raised in Battambang, a northwestern Cambodian city known for its strong regional music legacy, Chhom was something of a pop sensation in Cambodia, garnering success as a popular music performer on Cambodian TV variety shows as a teenager in the 1990s. After receiving an invitation to perform at a Minneapolis wedding, she immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty. Chhom relocated to Long Beach, California, where she began to perform in the local Cambodian-immigrant nightclub scene, joining Dengue Fever in 2001. Between 2003 and 2011 the band released four studio albums: Dengue Fever (2003), Escape from Dragon House (2005), Venus on Earth (2008), and Cannibal Courtship (2011). The band also contributed to Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, a documentary directed by John Pirozzi with an accompanying soundtrack in 2009, and a 2010 compilation of classic tracks from the pre-DK era music scene titled Dengue Fever Presents: Electric Cambodia. While the early albums relied heavily upon covers of pre-DK era music, recent albums mostly feature original material composed collectively by the band.

Although the band began with orientalist impulses, what actually emerged, as the band developed, was infinitely more complicated. Chhom’s performance as a native informant quickly took on an ironic distance as she shuttled between sonic, temporal, national, cultural, and racial spaces in a fashion that could critically undermine them. The cover art to Escape from

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Figure 2: Dengue Fever, album art for Escape from Dragon House, 2005.

Dragon House, for example, deploys a visual image of the native informant, with Chhom standing in the gracious position of host, welcoming the listener to the sonic adventure promised by the album. Her smiling face takes up the left third of the image and has been digitally altered to give it a technicolor sheen evoking an LP cover from the late sixties. Her hair is piled upon her head in a tower of curls and dangling gold earrings hang from each ear. The image features a psychedelic lime green and yellow record and in the upper part of this label is a small hand drawing of a man cycling a woman in a bicycle rickshaw. At the top of the cover is the band’s name written in an amateurish, orange script. The inside photograph is a blurry image of a busy Phnom Penh street, packed with people riding on the ubiquitous motos that fill the rapidly developing streets of urban Southeast Asia. So where the cover displays a sense of ethnic, nostalgic pastiche, the inside image acknowledges the conditions of industrial modernity that structure life in developing spaces throughout the global south (Figure 2).

The third track on the album, the masterfully psychedelic “Sni Bong,” is something of a sonic mirror of the aesthetic deployment of the native informant on the cover. Musically, it seems to leap out of a classic

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James Bond spectacle. The original song, which is collectively attributed to the band, has an ominous, dangerous bass line, minor key tonality, seedy saxophone licks, wild vocal acrobatics, and a magnetic riff near the end when Chhom delivers purring spoken verse atop a fluttering flute and sweetly tapping drum. She performs most of the song in Khmer, with a chorus that combines her mournfully longing wail and the band’s persistent grind, but concludes in the pleading English lyric, “Hold me close to you tonight, Oh Sni Bong” (“Sni Bong” Escape from Dragon House). As the band reaches the explosive dénouement, the instrumentation crescendos into the winding chain of minor notes that slide throughout the song, evocative of the sonic Western orientalism that characterized the best (and most offensive) soundscapes of Bond’s Asian adventures.

The cover to Dragon House and a track like “Sni Bong” contain playful winks, as if to suggest to the listener or viewer that the band is well aware of the aural and visual stereotypes that they are playing off of in evoking a potentially fictional time before and a place elsewhere which is consolidated in the body of Chhom’s native informant. The cover’s wild color combinations (such as the gaudy juxtaposition of Chhom’s towering hair and the lime-green record) are so visually over-stimulating that, even if we wanted to believe that this was a record cover from 1969, the temporal authenticity of the image is not quite in order. In the same way, the citation of both the musical ingenuity of musicians from the pre-DK rock scene, fused with the wildly stereotypical and Bond-like references that flow throughout “Sni Bong,” suggest that the musical time and space that Dengue Fever is citing is, perhaps, one that never truly existed. This is not to say that the past did not happen, but that the nostalgia that regularly attaches itself to performances of the past is often referential to cultural fictions as much as the realties of the events that actually occurred. In a global context, Western perceptions of those realities are often transformed into a fantasy geared toward a production of the “East” along the lines of what the “West” desires from the “East.” In her position as the native informant, the gendered ethnic body regularly becomes the proxy for this orientalist desire. Chhom’s deployment of the native informant to perform across different temporal and cultural junctures does not elide these tensions so much as it makes them tangible for an audience, raising significant questions about the politics of memory and narratives of cultural authenticity.

As noted earlier, the genesis of Dengue Fever was in no way the exception to the rule of orientalism, especially with regards to the male band members’ desire to cast an ethnic-Cambodian woman as lead singer.

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The effects of a latent desire for cultural authentication may have been well-intended, but easily reproduced the very conditions requiring Chhom to perform a mimetic form of authentic ethnic difference in order to live up to the desires and expectations of a Western audience and her Western, male collaborators. Nor can class disparity be ignored in such a situation wherein the core of the male band members, from predominantly middle- class backgrounds, did not have the same impetus to comport to the spectacle of orientalist self-presentation that Chhom was asked to enact. While the band’s success could offer a livelihood for the male members, for Chhom this success was intimately tied to forms of economic survival, indissoluble from a need to maintain economic independence to protect her immigration status. The gendering and racialization of Chhom was thus evidenced early in the band’s tenure as, for example, male band members insisted that Chhom wear “traditional” clothing, despite her desire to wear the signifiers of consumer pop culture (Guess jeans, etc.) that are popular in both the United States and the global south (Gross). She is produced as the ethnic outsider who is tem- porally marked as prior to modernization. Representational struggles over Chhom’s self-expression within the band are thus significant of the internal class, ethnic, and national distinctions that distinguish the conditions charac- terizing the labor performed by the men from the labor performed by Chhom.

Dengue Fever’s express interest in breaking down national and cultural boundaries through cross-cultural collaboration easily reproduces the disproportionate power dynamics of previous so-called intercultural endeavors in which privileged Euro-American artists are inspired by, collaborate with, and often exploit ethnic subjects for commercial and personal artistic gain, regardless of intentions.7 Although ethnic artists may reap extraordinary benefits by collaborating with well-established (and institutionally supported) Western artists, the effect can also be a reification of his or her status as an ethnic outsider who is anterior to Western modernity. Such projects easily reproduce the racist logic that casts the ethnic subject as always, already oriented toward a pre-modern state that is the product of Western fantasy, reinforcing the orientalist vision of what Eastern culture and life should be. At the same time, by continually performing memory and nostalgia with a sense of ironic pastiche, as noted earlier, the band makes explicit the internal contradictions within racial narratives that cast the ethnic other as occupying a primordial temporality. Doing so, the band expresses these contradictions in a fashion that begins to destabilize the temporal, national, cultural, and racial distinctions that characterize the process of ethnic subjection in a contemporary US context.

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Toying with notions of cultural authenticity through their acts of memory and nostalgia, the band achieves what Gayatri Gopinath has elsewhere discovered in the work of British-Asian band Cornershop, a deployment of “nostalgia not to evoke lost homelands, or a fantasized imperial past, but rather to offer a different vision of history, collectivity, and cultural genealogy” (39). To extend Gopinath’s terms: “Nostalgia in their music functions not to reify the nation,” but instead to undermine the construction of the United States as a nation of uncontaminated borders. It does so by problematizing the notion of Southeast Asia as a source of origin, authenticity and “redemptive cultural identity.” The ostentatious nature of the second album’s cover and a track like “Sni Bong,” while certainly nodding to the kind of ethnic nostalgia and problematic authenticity that Chhom has had to embody in her work with the band, emphasizes the contradictory impossibility of fixed ethnic difference and authenticity or temporality. In doing so, these very acts demonstrate the political capacity of a performance of memory to undo the fixed temporal, national, racial, and cultural narratives that accompany the process of racializing ethnic subjects in the United States.

“No, I Can’t Forget” Beyond the forms of orientalist nostalgia deployed by the band,

Dengue Fever’s primary mode of performing memory is manifest in its choice to revive the catalogue of the pre-DK rock scene. In doing so, Dengue Fever does not invent a performance practice that destabilizes authenticity; it inherits one. Although potentially misunderstood as “authentically Cambodian,” the pre-DK era music that the band covers resists catego- rization as authentic by any aesthetic, temporal, spatial, cultural, or national definitions. Of the artists covered by Dengue Fever, Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth reign supreme. Sinn had been a court musician in the 1960s and became famous as a crooning balladeer aptly compared to Nat King Cole. His voice is stunningly smooth, marked by an evocative melancholia that surges forth in original material as well as covers of popular rock hits, including versions of “Whiter Shade of Pale” and “Hey Jude.” In 1965, Sinn discovered young starlet Ros Sereysothea working as a wedding performer in Battambang. Ros’s expansive catalogue features her crystalline voice performing a range of popular music including songs influenced by Khmer folk traditions, duets with Sinn, as well as reincarnated covers of Western hits including “Proud Mary” and “Louis Louis.” Artists like these were the

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cornerstones of Cambodian youth culture, their music the soundtrack of a tumultuous era.

This music drew on a range of traditions that began with the fusing of traditional Cambodian dance and music with Latin and Afro-diasporic music introduced as a result of the Philippine sea trade in the 1930s, music that came to be known as phleng manil (Manila music/songs) (Mamula 29– 31). French cabaret music, introduced by French colonists, also contributed to the emergence of a new popular music. King Sihanouk was a prolific composer and performer during the 1950s and 1960s. With his support, government-run schools that initially trained in the traditional arts began to incorporate training in Western music theory (Daravuth and Muan 190– 237). The increased US military presence in neighboring South Vietnam and Thailand in the 1960s led to a rock and pop music subculture that came to its zenith in the late Sihanouk (1952–1969) and Lon Nol (1969–1975) years. With the spread of affordable radio technology, many Cambodians were introduced to rock and roll as well as rhythm and blues on pirated radio waves carrying the Voice of America and the US Armed Forces Radio, radically restructuring the type of popular music produced within the nation’s borders.

On April 17, 1975, the rock scene of Cambodia ground to a halt as the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, taking control of Cambodia in its entirety. The Khmer Rouge established a regime of forced forgetting by evacuating the urban cities overnight and strategically dismantling or violently abolishing those institutions most responsible for the transmission of history and memory: schools, family, religion, and the arts. In their own words, the CPK sought to “abolish, uproot, and disperse the cultural, literary, and artistic remnants of the imperialists, colonialists, and all the other oppressor classes” (Party Center CPK 113). The new society of the Khmer Rouge was achieved not merely by decrying the past, but by erasing it completely, “smashing” any thing or person that the regime perceived to be compromised by it.8 Artists, who the Khmer Rouge thought to be contaminated by the bourgeois tendencies of the previous society, were considered particularly dangerous, especially those who practiced the popular forms described in this essay. As survivor Teeda Butt Mam wrote in 1996, to the Khmer Rouge “former celebrities, the poets [were criminal]. These people carried bad memories of the old, corrupted Cambodia” (13). Significantly, music was seen as a primary means of educating and inspiring the masses. While nearly all forms of cultural production came to a standstill from 1975 to 1979, the Center pledged to continue the “strengthening and expanding of songs and poems” celebrating the revolution (Kiernan, The

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Figure 3: Memorial image of Pan, Sin, and Ros at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo by author, 2008.

Pol Pot Regime 113). By the time the Vietnamese marched into Phnom Penh, simultaneously liberating and occupying Cambodia in 1979, few of the musicians from the previous era (including Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea) were still alive (Figure 3).

When people welcomed the Khmer Rouge to Phnom Penh, many did so less because they were truly enthusiastic about the little-known rebel forces, and more because they mistakenly assumed that things could not possibly get any worse.9 After all, the Lon Nol and Sihanouk periods were characterized by war and corruption, as well as brutal dictatorial and monarchist tyranny.10 For some, the idyllic world of lovers and dancing depicted in pre-DK rock music never existed at all. For others, this world was a fantasy that provided the kind of hope necessary for surviving abject circumstances. And for many, the music simply signified a bitter impossibility that reflected the fantasies of an elite class living off of the exploitation of the poor (Vickery 18). In this sense, Dengue Fever’s appropriation of this body of music and deployment of the native informant enacts a performance of memory that not only invites an audience to recall

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a past that was traumatically lost; it simultaneously performs a version of the past that did not necessarily exist. Harnessing the power of performance in the face of historical erasure, the band offers a sonic version of the world as it has been, as we wanted it to be, and as it could become.

Reviving the music traditions of the pre-DK era, Dengue Fever foregrounds a history that has been virtually erased from the political and historical consciousness of many US audiences. Band members have consistently articulated the music’s genesis less as linear progression from an origin than as a series of networked exchanges that defy linear temporality or geographic and cultural purity. Foregrounding this history of exchange and overlap, the band provides the audience with an opportunity to enter into a conversation about these histories and potentially question their elision. Speaking with an English language radio station in Phnom Penh, for example, Dengue Fever’s bassist, Senon Williams, described “Pow Pow,” the band’s cover of Ros Sereysothea’s “Have You Seen My Love” as “derived from surf music, from the sixties. . . It goes from like this. . . like, kinda US, California— where we’re from—surf music and then it comes all the way over here to Cambodia and then rewritten with Cambodian melodies” (Pirozzi). As the product of a pre-existing network of cross- cultural exchanges, Dengue Fever’s music directly challenges the possibility of “return” by defying the notion that the music of the pre-DK era was “original” or “authentic” to begin with. At the same time, this engagement with a past-under-erasure asks audiences to consider what might be gained through acts of memory. “Pow Pow,” as a song that narrates a figure who willfully refuses amnesia, highlights the ways in which Dengue Fever’s performance of music from an elided past can highlight forgotten histories and open up a discussion of their ongoing effects.

In “Pow Pow” the narrator powerfully describes the feelings associated with loss and erasure, singing in Khmer about a missing boyfriend:

Have you seen my boyfriend? Who picked up my love? Who has the guts to snatch my love? Please let me have him back. (Dengue Fever, “Pow Pow”)

Initially little more than a trite lover’s narrative, it is Ros’s performance that lends the song significance. Her vocals are slow and melancholic, embedded in an arrangement that features a driving band with

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Figure 4: Dengue Fever performing live in 2011. Photo by Jeff Koga.

a psychedelic organ, purring sax, and ragged wah-wah guitar. She ascends into her upper register with a twinkling vibrato while forging the lower notes with a confident sense of control. But the tragedies the Khmer Rouge inflicted upon Cambodia a few years after the song was recorded inscribes a haunting resonance into these otherwise forgettable lyrics. In the wake of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, the pleading figure takes on a historical urgency as she asks, “Have you seen my boyfriend?” As the disappearance of loved ones (for interrogation, torture, and murder) was a common occurrence, survivors were often left to ask the questions listed in the song as the Khmer Rouge kidnapped and murdered lovers, family members, and friends.

Dengue Fever performs the song at a faster tempo than Ros’s version, with the band racing at a pace akin to Phnom Penh’s deluge of traffic. In the third verse, she sings:

No, I can’t forget. I see a man and thought he was you. I soared up and was about to embrace him. I yelled out “Bong! Bong!” But I was completely mistaken.

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Chhom’s voice is less longing than Ros’s. Instead, it is forceful and fierce, embellished with strong bursts of anger. Here, she describes the phantasm of a lost lover, one that inspires in the narrator a compulsion to call out his name, only to discover that her longing has betrayed her: that which has been taken remains lost to her. Still, in a stark rejoinder to an unspoken imperative to leave him behind, she opens up the verse with the statement, “No, I can’t forget.” In turn, one might hear in this vocal refusal to forget an echo of the gentle ritual of lighting a candle in Echo Park; in both we find a subtle, public refusal to let go of a past that remains unmourned.

I want to be clear that I am not attempting to reduce Dengue Fever’s performance to a neat political schema. In other words, I am not trying to prove that the band’s music always responds directly and consciously to the political circumstances here discussed. Rather, I want to suggest that the band’s self-conscious engagement with music from Cambodia’s past serves as a point of entry into this elided history for its audiences. Keenly aware of the importance of memory in relation to Cambodian and US entanglement, the band performs the past in such a way that invites audiences to listen to the resonances imposed upon a song like “Have You Seen My Love?/Pow Pow” by the burden of history.

The erased legacy of the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge eras are not the explicit content of Dengue Fever’s music. But the resonances produced by playing music from this past result in accompanying performances of political and pedagogical engagement by the band. Near the middle of Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, for example, a documentary that tracks the band on a tour of Cambodia, Chhom discusses the pre-DK rock music’s significance for Cambodians and, particularly, older generations. This sequence is immediately followed by a voice-over from an unidentified male band member who makes the stakes explicit:

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Cambodia suffered more than any other country as a result of America’s War with Vietnam. The war allowed the Khmer Rouge to come to power and under Pol Pot’s leadership about one third of the population died. . . . Cambodia’s entire culture came close to disappearing. (Pirozzi)

For the remainder of the film, Dengue Fever collaborates with Cambodian Living Arts, a Phnom Penh based NGO committed to the preservation of threatened cultural traditions within Cambodia.

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Given the band’s commitment to performing a legacy threatened by erasure, it does not take much to hear resonances between the narrative in “No, I can’t forget” and the losses experienced by Cambodians at home and in the diaspora in the post-DK era. With an acute awareness of this fact, Dengue Fever not only places pieces of this oft-elided past before audiences that may not be aware of their significance, but actively seeks out the opportunity to use this mode of performance to engage in audience education. This subtle pedagogy is performed through a range of practices, from the documentary, to the Echo Park ritual, or through public interviews in which band members draw attention to the history of US and Cambodian military entanglement. Performing classic songs by Ros or Sinn, the band manifests the sentiment at the heart of “Pow Pow” by refusing to forget the significance of this legacy. Furthermore, Dengue Fever invites its audience to do the same as we listen along, setting the stage for a discussion that might be able to take account of this amnesia’s effect on both the past and the present.

The great forgetting of the Vietnam War’s disproportionate impact on Cambodians continues to wreak havoc in the lives of Cambodian Americans in the present. Immigration law and the subsequent welfare policy that impacted Cambodian immigrants upon arrival in the United States regularly demanded compulsory acts of amnesia among the immigrants, while also serving as one way in which the US government could control which parts of the war the nation would remember, and which parts it would repress. In 1975 Congress passed legislation declaring its intent to assist Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees and setting aside funds to do so.11 It took until 1977 for Congress to authorize a record of admissions to establish permanent residency for Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees.12 However, because the United States was reticent to acknowledge that the Khmer Rouge was an enemy, from 1975 to 1979 very few of the Cambodians who were able to escape from the Khmer Rouge were accorded refugee status. Instead, Cambodian refugees were callously classified as unprotected “displaced persons.” Following the 1979 collapse of DK, the United States just as quickly forgot this distinction and began accepting Cambodian refugees as a means of repudiating the Vietnamese-backed government of the newly established People’s Republic of Kampuchea. The Cambodian population in the United States grew from less than 20,000 in 1979 to approximately 120,000 by 1990. This pattern of migration tapered off in the 1990s as the US government finally recognized the sitting government of Cambodia.13

In effect, the United States refused refugees during the four years of Khmer Rouge tyranny and only began accepting refugees after the Khmer Rouge

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was toppled—which was the same moment that the United States decided to demand the rest of the world recognize the Khmer Rouge government-in- exile as the legitimate government of Cambodia.

Cambodian immigrants who came to the United States under the provisions of the Indochinese Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 (IMARAA) were often deposited in unlikely places like Minnesota, or urban areas like San Francisco or Long Beach. Subject to conditions of urban poverty and violence, Cambodian American subjection not only occurs on the legal terrain of immigration law, but on the parallel terrain of welfare policy. This was exacerbated by the fact that, shortly after Cambodian refugees arrived in the United States, many of the social services they relied upon for survival underwent radical neoliberal reform during the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, many Cambodian American refugees were required to perform themselves in comportment with the expectations of the neoliberal state in order to receive recognition and public assistance. Such performances often required contradictory acts of either (or both) self-subjection (producing the self as a victim) or amnesia (erasing one’s relationship to the past in order to assimilate).

Anthropologist Aihwa Ong has argued that medical and welfare institutions in the 1980s and 1990s commonly projected an image of Cambodian refugees as damaged victims, requiring refugees to perform the role of the “depressed Cambodian” in order to receive public support (118–19). At the same time, these acts of compulsory mimeticism (producing the ethnic immigrant subject as sick victim) collided with welfare reforms that required new citizens to place the traumatic effects of surviving the Khmer Rouge and immigration experience under erasure so as to become self-managing, productive, laboring subjects on the new terrain of the neoliberal nation. As critics such as Lisa Duggan have noted, welfare reform laws (like the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 [PRAWORA]) maintained the production of a sub-class of often racialized and gendered laborers, while withholding assistance from such classes unless they fell into accordance with (often impossible) neoliberal ideals of self-management and “personal responsibility” (15).14 Adding insult to injury, the PRAWORA excluded non-citizens from eligibility for social support, disproportionately affecting Asian and Latino immigrant communities (Ancheta 38–39). This affected another violent erasure, disavowing the state’s responsibilities for refugee populations, like Cambodian Americans, produced as a direct result of US military aggression overseas.

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Though not a refugee, Chhom articulates her own immigration experience in complete accordance with the narrative demanded of Cambodian American immigrants by the state:

Living in America, I had to be self-sufficient. I had no help. It was one depending on oneself. . . . I did everything for myself. . . . I was my own boss. It was a struggle having to wait for my citizenship papers for three years. I had to be patient. I endured having less. I worked and went to school. . . . In America, when one sings or works, it is only enough for oneself. (Pirozzi)

Comparing this experience to her life in Cambodia, where she was supported by and able to support a large family, Chhom describes the erasure of these larger bonds in order to achieve status as a self-sustaining individual. Policy such as the PRAWORA literally demands that immigrants and refugees “take responsibility” for (or, “forget” and “get over”) their circumstances, regardless of the historical and systemic conditions responsible for their current condition. The performance of memory enacted in aesthetic practice such as those modeled by Dengue Fever thus offer an alternative space wherein the subject might refuse the directive to forget.

If the state compels a performance of amnesiac self-reliance from immigrants like Chhom, Dengue Fever’s continual gesture toward the past stages an alternative narrative in which history and memory are not placed under erasure. By returning to the repertoire of musicians from the pre-DK era, Chhom’s commanding performances with Dengue Fever are significant of both a refusal and an inability to forget. In this sense, the repetition of “No, I can’t forget” in a song like “Have You Seen My Love?” becomes an inadvertent political statement. It serves as a rejoinder to the subjection of the Cambodian American body which is defined as irreparably damaged by his or her unwillingness to relinquish the past. Maintaining an attachment to the past through the revival of the pre-DK catalogue might then be understood as an articulated strategy that becomes a condition of political possibility meant to force the present to reconcile with a past that exists under violent erasure. Performing this past, Dengue Fever subtly refuses both the national amnesia and amnesiac processes of assimilation that require the elision of past losses which were never officially acknowledged or mourned in the first place. By performing remnants of the erased legacy of US and Cambodian entanglement before Western audiences, Dengue Fever suggests that these audiences have a great deal of memory work to do if they are to

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reconcile with the complicated history of US intervention overseas. For audiences in the United States this may be particularly poignant given that such actions are purportedly enacted in the political defense of US national security. Performing this music in a time marked by a new group of wars and enhanced national security anxieties, the band raises significant questions about ongoing forms of subjection that are occurring in the GWOT. The implications of this intervention and, in turn, the effect that national security anxieties have had on Cambodian Americans in the past decade will be my focus for the remainder of this essay.

“22 Nights” The band began to record their first album in 2002. Around this same

time the newly-formed US Department of Homeland Security introduced a color-coded terror alert system. During one of the first orange alerts, Chhom was stopped in a “routine check by immigration agents,” discovered with a lapsed green card and placed in an INS detention center for 22 days (Smith). “22 Nights,” one of the songs on the album, captures Chhom and the band’s response to this event. But before discussing Dengue Fever’s performance of the song, I want to situate “22 Nights” in the political and legal context that brought about the events that led the band to write and record it. In particular, I want to emphasize how Chhom’s encounter with the INS was not simply a byproduct of the government’s overreaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, but occurred within the larger continuum wherein racialized, Asian immigrant bodies are cast as potential threats to national security. Thus, I suggest that in “22 Nights” the band performs an immediate memory (that of Chhom’s incarceration) as a means of combating the ongoing amnesia that facilitates the subordination and uniform subjection of vulnerable immigrant groups in the United States as part of the GWOT.

Unsurprisingly, US foreign and domestic policy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has been accompanied by a plethora of overlapping and often contradictory acts of national amnesia, both official and populist. One facet of this amnesia is a popularly held sentiment that the Bush and Obama administrations enacted a set of unjust policies (such as the suspension of civil protections for specific types of bodies or the targeting of immigrant groups as national security threats) as an unprecedented response to the attacks of 9/11. In reality, such policy is built upon an already existing legal architecture that has long conceived of racialized bodies and immigrant groups as potential threats to national security. This includes, among other

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events, the displacement and concentration of Native Americans, the period of Chinese Exclusion, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the criminalization of black and Latino youth in the prison industrial complex. The subordination of racialized subjects and immigrant groups under the umbrella of national security interests, therefore, is nothing new, so much as it became spectacularly more apparent to some following the 9/11 attacks. The case of Cambodian America has not been the exception to this rule, but exemplary of it.

Chhom’s detention occurred during a period when US law and public culture was reaffirming the production of ethnic immigrants as visceral threats to national security. Two 1996 bills enacted by Congress in the wake of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City—the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDP) and the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA)—exponentially reified this form of subjection for Cambodian Americans in particular.15 This disparate impact occurred because IIRAIRA included a provision that required the deportation of non-citizen immigrants (including permanent resident aliens) convicted of aggravated felony, even if they had already completed the terms of their sentence. But because of the US government’s refusal to recognize the governments of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea and State of Cambodia (1979–1993) until 1991, the terms of most diplomatic relations had yet to be fully defined by the time of IIRAIRA’s enactment. No treaty of reciprocity (allowing the repatriation of immigrants to Cambodia) existed between the United States and its former “enemies” from the Vietnam War (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). As a result, hundreds of Cambodians taken in under IIRAIRA were arrested and held indefinitely in INS detention centers with the State Department having nowhere to send them “back.” Many of these detainees were refugees who had come to the United States as infants and toddlers. Although they were technically free, as historian Linda Kerber has argued, the INS detained “nearly two hundred prisoners who had prospect neither of freedom nor deportation” (741). In 2001 the case made its way to the Supreme Court in the form of Ashcroft v. Kim Ho Ma.16

The short-term memory of the US government that characterizes its treatment of Cambodian American refugees once again affects the detainees in the Cambodian deportation cases. In these cases ostensibly American youth are processed and treated as hostile enemy aliens. In Ashcroft v. Kim Ho Ma, a ruling delivered in June of 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that the

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Justice Department did not have the authority to indefinitely detain resident aliens, such as Kim Ho Ma, inventing a six-month period of “reasonable” detention, after which the Justice Department would have to release the detainees into the general population until their removal from the United States could be secured.17 Significantly, the Court specified that this right of release did not apply to a “small segment of particularly dangerous individuals, say suspected terrorists,” leaving open the question of whether indefinite detention on the grounds of national security was permissible under the Constitution.18 But following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the State Department placed pressure on the Cambodian government to accept the deportees so as to demonstrate tighter national security. Thus, the Court’s fine distinction between non-threatening immigrants (such as Ma) and “terrorists” was virtually dissolved. The Justice Department sought vigorous enforcement of IIRAIRA, rendering 1,500 Cambodian Americans (of which the majority had spent most if not nearly all of their lives in the United States) subject to deportation. Many of these youth (including Ma) were convicted of gang activity, violence emerging out of uniquely American conditions of urban injustice (Grabias and Newnham).

Ma was the first to be deported to Phnom Penh, hardly speaking a word of Khmer, banned from ever returning to the United States, and having nowhere to live. These young men and women, many of whom identified as American, were transformed into Cambodians by virtue of their technical status as a “permanent resident alien” (rather than citizen), a status gained in part because of US involvement in Cambodia during the war. Without the technical protections of citizenship many Cambodian American refugees remain at the limits of national belonging, subject to some of its worst maladies, including urban poverty, racism and violence, while tentatively oriented toward an outside with a constant threat of deportation. The law thus uniformly (re)produces them as (a) aliens, excluded from national belonging and (b) potential threats to the security of the nation (the United States) in which they grew up. During the 22 nights that Chhom spent in an INS detention cell, she too found herself a part of this performatively produced mass.

One might argue that the law worked in Chhom’s favor, as, with the help of lawyers, she was able to secure relief from detention and repair the process leading to her eventual citizenship. Doing so would ignore any range of problems including the potential trauma of being transformed into a part of this mass and held for nearly a month in an INS prison, or the economic impact that the event would have on an immigrant and artist who had been

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struggling to make ends meets long before the arrest. Following Chhom’s release from the INS detention center, she was forced to pick up extra work as a nightclub singer at the Dragon House (the Long Beach Cambodian nightspot referenced in the band’s second album title) to make money so that she could pay off her legal fees.

“22 Nights” performs the sounds of Chhom’s incarceration, placing the listener in a challenging aural terrain that begins with deprivation and isolation and ends in a state of open chaos. Collectively credited to the band, the song is a powerful and moving indictment of the state’s production of people like Chhom or Ma as part of an exceptional mass of ethnic- immigrants, performatively (re)produced by the law as national security threats. Doing so, the song unleashes and gives primacy to the range of feelings that arise from this experience. In this way, Chhom performs “22 Nights” as a different kind of native informant, one who articulates and gives voices to the elided experiences of Cambodian Americans (and other racialized subjects) who have been subject to exceptional violence by the United States in cases similar to Ma’s or Chhom’s.

If the processes of racial and national subjection rely upon the production of fixed political oppositions between self and other, citizen and immigrant, patriot and terrorist, “22 Nights” refuses any kind of subjective fixity and opens out onto a terrain that might best be defined as anarchy. The rigid organization of bodies and feelings in the post 9/11 period became a primary tactic for the US government. The Bush administration deployed stark Manichean rhetoric, seeking to combat the indeterminate chaos threatened by terrorism by producing entire masses of racialized and Muslim bodies as potential enemies, while deploying totalizing technologies like the color-coded terror alert system. “22 Nights” offers an aesthetic rebuttal to the organization of affect and strict control, negative categorization, and subjection of racialized, immigrant bodies. The song instead opts to refuse the depersonalizing technologies of immigrant detention policy and features the private and sometimes chaotic feelings produced by those targeted by the government. Memory, then, is key once more, as the song refuses to forget the countless immigrants who continue to be rendered invisible as they are held in INS detention centers, as much as it refuses to forget the wounds inflicted on Chhom in particular during her orange-alert period in detention.

In the beginning we hear Chhom’s voice, sad and isolated, with sparse accompaniment: scattered acoustic guitar, ambient drumming, haunting flute, and the occasional organ. As the song continues she breaks into a

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heart-wrenching chorus that builds to a mournful explosion, introducing sax riffs when the voice can no longer go on. In the final minutes, as Chhom completes the last chorus, her voice is angry, even furious. The band continues to build a condensing cloud of sound while distant voices wail melodically in the background. Soon enough, the band’s cohesion becomes overwhelmed by chaos.

As every performance of the song remembers and relives the fracturing effects of 22 nights in an INS detention center, these performances give way to a politically productive critique of the massification and subjection of Cambodian American immigrants. Rather than the organized structures of control imposed by the state upon the body of immigrant, racialized citizen, “terrorist,” and “enemy combatant,” “22 Nights” explodes into sonic anarchy. The ghostly background voices are overpowered by wailing instruments and these instruments build to a peak before dissolving and crashing into each other. The voices now break against a wildly roaming saxophone, the percussion relies more on the anarchy of cymbals than the rhythm of drums, and the guitar and organ riffs soar unhinged. Against the organization of national affect, “22 Nights” sets free all the raw, dangerous, and uncontrolled feelings attached to Chhom’s incarceration and the singularity of her lived experience. Placing emphasis on the voice of the detainee, “22 Nights” highlights Chhom’s singularity within this chaotic landscape. The song refuses her subjectivization by the technologies of the national security state, which registers racialized immigrants as national security risks.

Conclusion In the video for “Seeing Hands,” the first single from Venus on

Earth, the band continues to emphasize their investment in temporal, spatial, cultural, and ethno-national collisions. The song is an angry, melancholic, and driving anthem of a broken heart. It begins with a pulsing organ and evokes the sounds of static, before exploding into a burst of syncopated drums and guitars. In the opening shot, we see a volcano with lava flowing forth at the end of a paved road with electrical towers looming in the foreground. The volcano fades and a van emerges, jetting toward us as a wall of fire explodes further down the road. This van is piled high with people, a sight not uncommon in the streets of a developing urban center like Phnom Penh. However, as the car approaches, we see that the crowd is a pile of the male members of Dengue Fever, with Zac Holtzman prominently crucified on the windshield, his long beard blowing in his face as the car

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speeds down the highway. Wearing a poncho and a small black hat, Williams rides behind the truck on a rickety bicycle.

Different sepia shots of the California landscape flash before us as the camera focuses on the van’s driver. The driver is Chhom. She is wearing a glittering, golden go-go dress and is singing sadly while a tear falls down her cheek. Singing in Khmer, the lyrics document a vengeance narrative in the wake of a broken heart:

First I’m going to heat you up And then I’m going to freeze you So that you can think of all the ways you hurt me. (“Seeing Hands” Dengue Fever)

Forcing the object of her address to “think of all the ways you hurt me,” the narrator points to the fact that a reconciliation with the past does not simply require a victim to overcome his or her wounds, but for the aggressor to account for their role in inflicting such wounds. The camera cuts between shots of industrial buildings and footage of a stealth bomber in flight. We see long shots of the southern California desert supplemented by scenes of the band crammed into the back of the van. The male band members play their instruments while Chhom sits in the foreground in silver dress, hair tightly piled atop her head in Audrey Hepburn style, singing and gesturing to her band mates.

The video, like the band, radically collapses national and temporal categories, without submitting to an amnesia that would erase and obscure the material histories that attach themselves to nations and bodies. Although one familiar with California deserts can identity the landscape, the initial shot of the band piled high atop the van gestures to scenes in which people in developing nations, or often day laborers in the United States, pile on top of trucks on the way to and from work sites. The stealth bomber flies above the desert as the band’s van makes its way down the long, straight road, suggesting the threat of US military omnipresence that so radically affected the course of history in 1970s Southeast Asia and today’s battlegrounds in the GWOT. Band members, wearing clothing associated with migrant Latino laborers, draw into relief the exploitation and subjection of immigrants in the contemporary United States while Chhom, the only immigrant member of the band, is meticulously styled to reflect a Hollywood ideal that is exported wholesale across the world.

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Initially a figure meant to translate across stratified social subject positions, the playful figure of the native informant, as performed by Chhom Nimol and Dengue Fever, has the potential for the destabilization of racial, national, cultural, and temporal categories that contribute to the hierarchical subordination and subjection of subaltern subjects in the global south or transnational immigrants within the United States. There are limits to this project, but performances like “22 Nights,” or the diachronic playing with history and subject positions in the video for “Seeing Hands,” suggest that it is possible to engage with, critique, and challenge forms of social and legal subjection. For Dengue Fever, these performances are linked to acts of memory. Such performances model possibilities for how we may begin to reconcile with the violence of history and imagine a future beyond its limits. As the ambivalent unsettling of categorical distinctions in the video for “Seeing Hands” shows us, what this may look like is undetermined, uncertain, problematic, and potentially dangerous. As the angry voice of “Have You Seen My Love?/Pow Pow” and “22 Nights” demands of us, such a project is critical if we are to realize the urgent necessity of a time and place beyond a present characterized by violent amnesia and of legal, national, cultural, and racial subjection that are just as violent.

Acknowledgments Thanks are due to Karen Tongson, Gus Stadler, the anonymous

reviewers, an audience of very astute undergraduates at Wesleyan University, Sonali Chakravarti, Joe Fitzpatrick, and Catherine Filloux. Bill and Shadi Letson generously subsidized my research trip to Cambodia. Thanks, also, to Dengue Fever and Josh Mills. Any errors and omissions are, of course, entirely my fault.

Notes

1. For more information on this period, see: Vickery; Becker; David P. Chandler. Voices; Chandler, Brother Number One and Kiernan.

2. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 456–60; Heuveline, “Between One and Three Million”; De Walque, “Selective Mortality During the Khmer Rouge Period in Cambodia.”

3. In a private meeting in 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said to the Thai Foreign Minister, Chatichai Choonhavan, “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we

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won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” “Secretary’s Meeting with Foreign Minister Chatichai of Thailand,” Memo- randum of Conversation (November 26, 1975, declassified July 27, 2004), http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/HAK-11–26-75.pdf., ac- cessed February 11, 2010.

4. For more information, see: Vickery 202–318, Becker, 437–507; Chandler, Brother Number One, 157–88; Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance; Stephen Heder and Brian D. Tittemore, Seven Candidates for Prosecution: Accountability for the Crimes of the Khmer Rouge (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2004); John D. Ciorciari, ed., The Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2006).

5. For more information, see: Lisa Lowe. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Vincent K. Her and Mary Louise Buley-Meissner, “Hmong Voices and Memories: An Exploration of Identity, Culture, and History through Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans,” Journal of Asian American Studies 13.1 (2010).

6. For elaboration, see: Shapiro, “Songs My Enemies Taught Me”; Ly, “Devastated Vision(s)”; Filloux, “Ten Gems on a Thread,” “Ten Gems on a Thread 2.”

7. There is a long tradition of such potentially exploitative intercultural collaboration in the work of musicians such as Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel, theater directors such as Peter Brook, Richard Schechner, and Julie Taymor, or film director Danny Boyle’s international smash-hit Slumdog Millionaire.

8. For more on the “smashing” of the Khmer Rouge enemies, see: Chandler, Voices.

9. In an anthology of memoirs of survivors compiled by actor Dith Pran, for example, numerous survivors recounted their family’s ambivalence about the Khmer Rouge’s arrival as well as life under Lon Nol. See Pran Dith, Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

10. Conditions in Cambodia were nearly unlivable by 1975. A food-rich country was on the brink of mass starvation as millions of peasants fled bombings in the countryside to unproductive metropolitan centers. As Michael Vickery succinctly described life in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge takeover, “for the rural 80% to 90% of the Cambodian people arbitrary justice, sudden violent death, political oppression, exploitative use of religion and anti-religious reaction,

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both violent and quiescent, were common facts of life long before the war and revolution of the 1970s” (Vickery, 18). See also Becker, 1–25; Ly, 68–69.

11. Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, 94–23, 94th Cong- ress (May 23, 1975), Appropriations for Vietnamese and Cambodian Refugees, 94–25, 94th Congress (May 23, 1975). In 1976 IMARAA was amended to include Laotian refugees: Amendment to the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, 94–313, 94th Congress (June 21, 1976).

12. Amendment to the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, 95–145, 95th Congress (October 28, 1977).

13. For Census statistics see: “Region and Country or Area of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population: 1960–1990” (March 9, 1999, accessed on Februarly 11, 2010), http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab03. html. 2010) #1693; “Place of Birth for the Foreign-Born Population,” U.S. Census (2000, accessed February 13, 2010), http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ DTTable?_bm=y&-context=dt&ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U&-CONTEXT= dt&mt_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_PCT019&tree_id=403&-redoLog=true&- all_geo_types=N&-geo_id=01000US&-search_results=01000US&-format=&- _lang=en.

14. Duggan argues that such laws are significant of neoliberalism as “a broader cultural project of legitimating the redistribution of resources upward. . . [that] depended, for its cultural effectiveness, on coded hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality—especially as they affect women and children.”

15. Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Pub.L. 104–208 104th Congress (September 30, 1996), Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Pub.L. 104–132, 104th Congress (April 24, 1996).

16. Zadvydas v. Davis and INS, Ashcroft v. Kim Ho Ma, 533 U.S. 678 (2001).

17. Aschcroft v. Kim Ho Ma.

18. Ibid., 691., internal quotations removed.

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