Scheidt Graduate Research Fellow Viriya Yoo presents on literary representations of the Cambodian genocide

On April 1, 2026, Viriya Yoo, a PhD candidate in the English Department and the 2025 Charles E. Scheidt Graduate Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, delivered a lecture that asked what literature can teach us about the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979), situating this question within the broader Cold War history of Cambodia (1970–1998). She argued that diasporic literature on the Cambodian genocide should be understood not only as testimonial or historical record, but as a distinct formal category with its own literary traditions and representational forms. Drawing on a wide range of materials including memoirs, documentary film, fiction, poetry, plays, and graphic forms, Yoo’s project examines how writers and artists confront the difficulty of representing mass atrocity while also attempting to reconstruct subjectivity after its systematic destruction.

Yoo began by reframing the Cambodian genocide within a longer history of Cold War intervention and violence. She stressed that the genocide is often mistakenly treated as an isolated geopolitical event, when it is in fact bound up with U.S. military involvement in Cambodia during the Vietnam War era. She outlined how U.S.-backed political shifts, including the coup against Norodom Sihanouk and the rise of military officer Lon Nol, contributed to instability, alongside extensive U.S. bombing campaigns such as Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal. These interventions, she explained, helped create the conditions in which the Khmer Rouge gained support in rural Cambodia by presenting themselves as a force opposed to foreign involvement. They also secured support from monarchists through an endorsement by Sihanouk, who mistakenly believed that the Khmer Rouge would restore him to power after gaining control of the country. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh under the false pretext of imminent bombing, thereby seizing control of the administrative center. Upon taking power, they abolished private property and declared “Year Zero” under the regime of Pol Pot (nom de guerre for Saloth Sâr). The resulting social engineering project, Yoo explained, led to forced labor, famine, execution, and the deaths of approximately 1.5 to 3 million people.

Yoo then turned to the aftermath of the genocide and the formation of a Cambodian diaspora. She described refugee displacement through camps such as Khao-I-Dang and subsequent resettlement in countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, and France between the late 1970s and 1990s. She noted that these diasporic trajectories shape much of Cambodian cultural production today, particularly among 1.5- and second-generation writers. In her own family history, she explained that her father arrived in the United States as a refugee from the Khao-I-Dang camp. The silence in her family about the genocide led her to seek understanding through cultural texts, especially memoirs and documentaries, which provided her with the most immediate emotional and narrative access to this history.

One of Yoo’s central claims was that Cambodian genocide literature is structured by a tension between witnessing and representation, as well as between silence and speech. She argued that early dominant genres such as memoir and documentary are often treated as mimetic forms of testimony, valued for their ability to record lived experience. However, she emphasized that these works are also shaped by formal and aesthetic decisions that structure how genocide is remembered and understood. Rather than treating them as neutral historical documents, Yoo argued that they should be read as literary and visual constructions in which form plays an active role in producing meaning.

Yoo centred her analysis on two works: filmmaker Rithy Panh’s documentary The Missing Picture and scholar-writer Y-Dang Troeung’s memoir Landbridge. In discussing Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, she argued that the film uses its formal structure to reflect on the limits and possibilities of representation after genocide. Panh reconstructs his childhood under the Khmer Rouge using clay figurines, archival footage, and fragments of propaganda films produced by the regime. In her talk, Yoo drew the audience’s attention to the film’s constant references its own process of construction, particularly in scenes that show hands shaping clay figures that stand in for lost family members and erased lives. This strategy, she argued, highlights absence while also attempting to restore presence through visual reconstruction.

Yoo then turned to Y-Dang Troeung’s memoir Landbridge, which she described as a fragmented and reflective text that explores the relationship between silence, language, and survival. She noted that the memoir is composed of short, self-contained sections that often resemble poetry, reflecting Troeung’s attempt to grapple with the limits of expression. Written near the end of Troeung’s life following a cancer diagnosis, the memoir reflects on her identity as a Cambodian refugee in Canada, her role as a scholar, and her desire to leave a record for her son. A key concept in Yoo’s reading of Landbridge was the tension between silence and speech, particularly through Troeung’s engagement with the idea of the “mute tree,” a Cambodian idiom associated with survival during the genocide. Yoo explained that silence functioned as a survival strategy under the Khmer Rouge, where language itself was distorted and weaponized through slogans and ideological rewriting. In the aftermath of the genocide, silence became a lasting burden as survivors struggled to articulate experiences that resisted ordinary language. Across both works, Yoo noted that Panh and Troeung used artistic expression similarly to resist erasure and reassert narrative control over a history that was shaped by violence, a corruption of language, and the erasure of individuality. She argued that taking these cultural works seriously as artistic creations, rather than merely historical testimony, is essential for understanding both the Cambodian genocide and the broader relationship between literature and mass violence.

Yoo’s talk generated a lively Q & A, particularly discussions on generational change in Cambodian cultural production. Yoo observed that first-generation survivors and 1.5-generation descendants tend to favor realist and documentary forms, whereas second-generation writers increasingly turn to literary fiction, speculative fiction, romance, and other genre forms. Yoo suggested that temporal distance from the genocide makes experimentation more possible and reflects descendants’ attempts to imagine experiences they did not directly live through. Speculative fiction in particular, she noted, can offer new ways of thinking about trauma, displacement, and genocide by pushing questions of representation beyond strict realism. The Q&A also touched on themes of silence, memory, transnational influences, language, and adaptation. Yoo emphasized that literature and cultural production do more than document suffering; they create spaces for survivors and descendants to negotiate identity, agency, exile, and reconciliation.