Cathy Schlund-Vials's War, Genocide, and Justice is a significant contribution not only to memory studies or transnational cultural studies, but also to a new wave in Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American studies. As the coeditors (including this reviewer) of a recent special issue of positions observe, we are now witness to “a critical mass of often younger scholars engaged with the last decade's turn toward theories of neoliberalism and renewed sovereignty, circuits of popular culture, haunted memory and trauma, cultural geography, alternative archives, and the political work of feelings.”Footnote ¹ At the crest of this critical mass, Schlund-Vials indeed breaks new ground, drawing together traumatic remembrance and transition states, cultural labor and survivor subjecthood, in a dazzling display.

Schlund-Vials brings together close readings and Foucauldian insights with trauma theory, prodding at their overlaps as well as their conflicts, with rich ethnographic content to articulate the lines of inquiry identified at the interface of war, genocide, and justice. In doing so, she draws upon James Young's concept of memory work – the collective articulation of immeasurable loss – as the critical fulcrum for a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary inquiry about the discourse and practice of justice after war and genocide. What Schlund-Vials names the “Cambodian Syndrome” – whether borne by the Vietnamese-occupied regime, the post-coup state, the United Nations, or the United States – enacts erasures of the specific conditions for state violence in the past almost-century, shaping both public forms of deniable culpability and a transnational collectivity of profound loss. That many former Khmer Rouge members continue to hold positions of power in the present state, including Prime Minister Hun Sen (who upon his 1998 coup issued pardons to his compatriots), haunts the UN/Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal, which, thirty years after the dissolution of Democratic Kampuchea, has tried and convicted only one minor Khmer Rouge official for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As Schlund-Vials observes so well, for this reason among others does it become apparent that the juridical realm is not, after all, where justice lies. Against these state-sanctioned gestures that aim to contain history, and to claim legitimacy, Schlund-Vials argues that Cambodian American memory work shapes acts of “remembering the forgetting,” acts that locate war and genocide not in the past, but as violence that is not ended in the present – found, for instance, in traces of traumatic returns, ruptured kinships, ongoing political repression, and refugee criminalization and deportation.

Schlund-Vials's first chapter, on “atrocity tourism,” sets the stage for her trenchant critique of institutional or state-sanctioned forms of memory and justice, which too often aim to reconcile the violence that is not ended in the service of recuperating the present state. The transformation of former structures and scenes of genocidal violence –most famously Tuol Sleng Prison and Choeung Ek killing field – into public memorials began with the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, which ousted the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea in 1979. Yet, as Schlund-Vials argues, such memorials and other scenes are marshaled to contain the specter of state violence to the ever-receding past, while securing the successor state as an arbiter of justice into the future. Of course, such violence is not actually ended, and in the following three chapters Schlund-Vials turns to Cambodian American cultural works – from autoethnographic documentary and life-writing to hip-hop and spoken-word performance – that forge cotemporal ties between the past and the present against the tendency to periodize histories of violence, and thus to forget or ignore their resonance now. Engaging communal memory in order to counter the imperative to forget and contain past transgressions, the work of Cambodian American artists and writers examined herein models a commitment to observe and interpret the traces of violence that is not ended with an eye for the devastating detail – whether in the miasma of a young girl's fear at the rap on the door in the labor camp, or in the young man's encounters with local police in the so-called land of the free. Her final examples in particular, including Prach Ly's hip-hop opus and Anida Yoeu Ali's prose, set alongside each the other despotic necropolitics and refugee biopolitics (especially those under the United States deportation regime), to perceive these as not distinct, but interlaced, crimes. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's concept of the heterotopia as a form of antiutopian critique, Schlund-Vials argues that these works disturb the premise of reconciliation and recovery in bringing together the ghosts among us with life after death, in order to remap a practice of justice.

Thus dense with evidence and concise in rigor, Cathy Schlund-Vials's War, Genocide, and Justice is an important historical and theoretical study of memory work as public policy and political resistance, forging new paths for the (still largely Eurocentric) field of trauma and transition studies as well as Asian Americanist critique.