Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
The entry of Cambodians in the United States was not simply a migration, but a crash-landing as refugees after an incredible loss of population, humanity, culture & arts, religion, and thinkers. How, then, do the diasporic inheritors of this history respond via cultural production? And how does artist-scholar Sokunthary Svay’s own work including her newly published memoir, Put It On Record, address this question?
Among the hundreds of thousands of survivors confined to refugee camps in the wake of the Khmer Rouge genocide, approximately 10,000 Cambodian refugees were eventually “resettled” in the Bronx over the course of the 1980s and ’90s. Chronicling their unfinished odyssey, through the eyes of one woman, Ra Pronh, Unsettled tells the story of an immigrant community’s survival and resistance amid the concentrated poverty of the Bronx. As the first book about Cambodian Americans in New York City, Unsettled also challenges commonly held notions of humanitarian rescue and relief. A community-embedded scholar, author Eric Tang argues that refuge cannot be found when resettlement efforts seek to mask the harsh urban conditions faced by poor people of color and immigrants in cities across the country.