Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics by Alvin Cheng Lim

Author:Alvin Cheng Lim [Lim, Alvin Cheng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781135132590
Google: mPvvimXCOMoC
Goodreads: 17121286
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

5 Cambodian literature as heterotopia

The appreciation of the work of art offers an avenue into the political milieu. In this chapter I shall deploy contemporary aesthetic theory in a political reading of Cambodian literature: both in its texts and their production. I shall deploy the Foucauldian notions of heterotopia and heterochrony to discuss the inversions of the revolutionary history of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation in Darina Siv's short story ‘Sokha and Apopeal’. I shall follow this with an application of Jacques Rancière's analysis of the distribution of the sensible to re-read the political milieus ‘Sokha and Apopeal’ and its literary predecessor, the popular Cambodian folktale Preah Ko Preah Keo, are embedded in. I shall then enlist the Rancièrean notion of political subjectification to analyze first, the recent manifestations of Preah Ko Preah Keo in the Cambodian political imagination, and second, the aesthetico-political struggle of Cambodia's writers during the postcolonial and revolutionary eras. I shall conclude with a deployment of Rancière's notion of dissensus in my reading of Yur Karavuth's short story ‘A Khmer Policeman's Story: A Goddamn Rich Man of the New Era’ to trace the precariousness of life in Cambodia under the market forces of the contemporary neoliberal era.

In Darina Siv's enigmatic short story ‘Sokha and Apopeal’ (2004), Sokha, a Cambodian boy, becomes best friends with Apopeal, a young bull. When the communist revolution arrives in 1975, Khmer Rouge cadres enforcing collectivization remove Apopeal from Sokha's care, almost severing this interspecies bond of friendship. When the brutality and starvation of the killing fields becomes too much to bear, Apopeal brings Sokha to a magical lake beyond the Khmer Rouge's control where they expand their interspecies friendship to a family of otters, a rabbit and the local forest community of monkeys. Three years after their arrival at the lake, Sokha is reunited with his family, and learns that life has been restored to its pre-revolutionary bliss:

Sokha, Apopeal, the rabbit, and Sokha's father and brother all went back to his village. He returned to school, joining the other children. Every day, he rode Apopeal to school, the rabbit sitting on Apopeal's head. From then on, Sokha and his family lived peacefully in their village.

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