Archiving erasure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Keywords: post-colonial geographies, archives, Phnom Penh, time, temporality, erasure
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26

Abstract

Two mirrored inscriptions face each other, etched into the North and South face of the imposing, marble veranda of the French Colonial Bibliotheque in central Phnom Penh (today the National Library and Archive complex). The first, written in French, translates to ‘force is temporary, knowledge is forever.’ The other, written in Khmer--though no doubt intended as a direct translation--more readily reads as, ‘force lies in one time, knowledge in all times.’ Foregrounding the frictions that translation, the built environment, and hetero-temporality bring to bear on the hegemonic historic record of property claims in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I argue that a history of dispossession cannot be written through a recuperation of records of possession. The official [A]rchive gives us a record of history inextricably indexed by and enunciated through the language of property (ownership, the right to exclude) and patrimony (ethno-national and nuclear family genealogies). To tell different stories we need not only other archives but also other modes of archival analysis and storytelling. Taking seriously the epistemological drift inaugurated by, “force lies in one time, knowledge in all times,’ I foreground a hetero-temporal urban archive built from the material and discursive remnants of struggles over place, history, and meaning in the city. This talk draws on 20 months of archival and ethnographic fieldwork in and around Phnom Penh and presents material for the first chapter of my in-process book titled: Chronopolis: crowded histories, patrimonial claims, and temporal closure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.