Note: This event will take place on 10/16 at 1:00 PM PST.

In this event, Prof. Boreth Ly will discuss his recent book, Traces of Trauma: Cambodian Visual Culture and National Identity in the Aftermath of Genocide (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) in conversation with Prof. Penny Edwards.

How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge through the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975-1979). The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Will the next generation be burdened with this inherited trauma? Boreth Ly seeks answers to these questions in the works of artists, photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, poets, and writers in Cambodia and its diaspora. An urgent exploration of the place for arts in illuminating and healing inter-generational scars of genocide, his book considers the arts of war and genocide as a ‘poison cure.’

Boreth Ly (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Art History and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz.

Penny Edwards is an Associate Professor of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.

For more information and to register, click here.