(Re)Creating Embodied Vulnerability and Relocation in Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge

Abstract

This essay takes up Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge: [life in fragments] and responds to an epistemological shift that confronts issues of Western complicity in foreign human rights abuses. Troeung’s creative and theoretical intervention in Landbridge raises questions around epistemological alternatives to Eurocentric notions of refugee healing and trauma recovery in the aftermath of mass violence. Following Troeung, I conceptualize this labour of challenging, transforming, asserting, and carving out new ways of living as acts of “refugee worldmaking.” Building on Rancière, I argue that this re-location of border subjectivity creates a new space of dissension and agency in order to contest previous attitudes of assimilative resilience to national policies.