Reframing Cold War Narratives

Refugee Aphasia and Agency in Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge

Abstract

Analyzing Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge: [life in fragments], this essay argues that the application of autotheory in life writing offers a strategy for solving the long-term conundrum of how to represent ethnic-minority life as it relates to the Cold War’s power struggles. Troeung’s narrative examines the ways in which her refugee identity is constructed on post-racial premises, which Troeung uses to disrupt the politics of self-representation in autobiographical writing. Guided by crip theory and cripistemology, Troeung demonstrates that aphasia offers a form of resistance to the collective amnesia enacted after the Cold War. Aphasia as resistance challenges the Western-centric understanding of Cambodian refugees’ lives as revolving around discourses of trauma, pain, and suffering. It thereby subverts the binary narratives that reduce Cold War geopolitics to Sino-US or Soviet-US antagonism, instead centring Cambodian life and history.