The coloniality of abridgment: afterlives of mass violence in Cambodia and the US

Abstract

This article examines processes of knowledge production around mass violence in 1970s Cambodia including media reportage and coeval scholarly debate, developing a conceptualisation of colonial abridgment. It assesses operations by which Cambodia as a country is violently essentialised, the occurrence of mass violence taking on metonymic grandeur that works to deny imperial legacies, entomb modern Cambodia in a hermetically sealed past and thereby maintain global order within existing racial-colonial logics.