Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
English
Advisor
Jonathan W. Gray
Committee Members
Wayne Koestenbaum
Eric Lott
Subject Categories
American Studies | Asian American Studies | Fiction | Film and Media Studies | Nonfiction | Poetry
Abstract
What happens to a people who lose a generation under an authoritarian regime, such as Cambodians via the Khmer Rouge regime? Using the term “generation loss,” borrowed from the audio-visual world, I treat it as a metaphor for theorizing the diasporic cultural outcome after a lost generation, and for the cultural and data transfer between Cambodian urtext (works before the Khmer Rouge regime) to diasporic cultural production primarily in the western world. The dissertation will look at case studies in the form of film, literary and musical works, while incorporating the author’s positionality through autotheory and autoethnography in the form of the personasl archive. With a nod toward Black feminist critique by Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe, I build upon the work of Southeast Asian feminist scholars such as Cathy Schlund-Vials, Yến Lê Espiritu and Y-Dang Troeung to answer the burning question: what does a diaspora culturally produce after tragically losing a generation of their people to conflict and what is the resonance of pre-conflict production on the younger generation?
Recommended Citation
Svay, Sokunthary, "The Resonance of Generation Loss: Cambodian Diasporic Cultural Production After the Khmer Rouge" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6294
Included in
American Studies Commons, Asian American Studies Commons, Fiction Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Nonfiction Commons, Poetry Commons
