Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering.

Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists

Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars

As a child growing up in Cambodia, Ronnie Yimsut played among the ruins of the Angkor Wat temples, surrounded by a close-knit community. As the Khmer Rouge gained power and began its genocidal reign of terror, his life became a nightmare. In this stunning memoir, Yimsut describes how, in the wake of death and destruction, he decides to live.

Escaping the turmoil of Cambodia, he makes a perilous journey through the jungle into Thailand, only to be sent to a notorious Thai prison. Fortunately, he is able to reach a refugee camp and ultimately migrate to the United States, where he attended the University of Oregon and became an influential leader in the community of Cambodian immigrants. Facing the Khmer Rouge shows Ronnie Yimsut’s personal quest to rehabilitate himself, make a new life in America, and then return to Cambodia to help rebuild the land of his birth.

The late 16th-century novel Jin Ping Mei has been described as a landmark in the development of the narrative art form, there being no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. However, it is also seen as something of a wild horse, its graphically explicit depiction of sexuality earning it great notoriety. Although Jin Ping Mei was banned soon after its appearance, today the novel is considered one of the six classics of Chinese literature. It is thus no surprise that Jin Ping Mei has caught the attention of scholars working in many different fields, places and periods. Unfortunately, the interdisciplinary and transnational exchange has been limited here, in part because of distance and language barriers. The present volume aims to bridge this gap, bringing together the best quality research on Jin Ping Mei by both established and emerging scholars. Not only will it showcase research on Jin Ping Mei but also it will function as a reader, helping future generations to understand and appreciate this important work.

The Khmer Rouge rise to power in 1975 gave birth to a terrifying new order marked by killings, forced ruralization and total collectivization. Up to two million people died as a result. The memoir of Phi Phuon, Pol Pot’s aide-de-camp/bodyguard – compiled and translated by Henri Locard with introduction, annotations, and background history and analysis – offers important new perspectives on the period. Though a relatively minor actor, Phi Phuon worked closely with the Khmer Rouge leadership. His quite candid account describes how an enterprising and idealistic young man was drawn to a revolutionary cause whose leadership he saw as patriotic, visionary and even charismatic. Moreover, Phi Phuon was Jarai, from one of the borderland hill tribes despised by many Khmer. Here, in the jungles of Ratanakiri Province as war in Vietnam raged nearby, Pol Pot and his urban, intellectual comrades mobilized the ethnic minorities into a revolutionary army. Inspired by idealized perceptions of hill-tribe lifestyles, the Khmer Rouge also developed radical plans for a civilizational blank slate that were implemented when they came to power. Shedding light on events not fully revealed before, this is a significant contribution to the study of recent Cambodian history.

2019 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award winner

Scholars from a number of disciplines have, especially since the advent of the war on terror, developed critical perspectives on a cluster of related topics in contemporary life: militarization, surveillance, policing, biopolitics (the relation between state power and physical bodies), and the like. James A. Tyner, a geographer who has contributed to this literature with several highly regarded books, here turns to the bureaucratic roots of genocide, building on insight from Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, and others to better understand the Khmer Rouge and its implications for the broader study of life, death, and power.

The Politics of Lists analyzes thousands of newly available Cambodian documents both as sources of information and as objects worthy of study in and of themselves. How, Tyner asks, is recordkeeping implicated in the creation of political authority? What is the relationship between violence and bureaucracy? How can documents, as an anonymous technology capable of conveying great force, be understood in relation to newer technologies like drones? What does data create and what does it destroy? Through a theoretically informed, empirically grounded study of the Khmer Rouge security apparatus, Tyner shows that lists and telegrams have often proved as deadly as bullet and bombs.