In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia
with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What
emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in 1979 was a nation
fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth
of the country's population perished from hard labor, disease,
starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their
ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in
America.
From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle
to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on
more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well
as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts in
conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism,
transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power
as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective
healing. Exploring the interstices of home and exile, forgetting and
remembering, From the Land of Shadows follows the ways in which
Cambodian individuals and communities seek to rebuild connections frayed
by time, distance, and politics in the face of this injurious history.