This story is about singing. Often, singing is performed by some kind of vocalization, at times wordless, and at times full of verbiage. I came to better understand singing through the introduction of the language that remembering and learning from my elders offered me. Within that new context, I tried to figure out what to do with these songs. By telling this piece as a story and singing it as a song, I also want to point out that this narrative does not take the form of an essay that an academic readership might expect, and that the orality of its prose stems from traditions of writing from an undercommons “in, but not of,” the university.1 As such, this article refuses extraction organized by signposting and—like in any relationship—requires time. As I revisit with you later, I invite you here to be in relation with this story and to...
Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work
Brian V. Sengdala (he/they) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University researching Cambodian and Asian American studies, race, performance, sound, music, memory, refugeehood, and disability. He is thinking about performance as memory work and studies how second-generation Cambodian and Asian Americans use performance as critical fabulations in order to understand their own place in the world. Within this framework of memory, their sites of study range from performances in sounds, literature, theatre, minefields, and food to name a few.
Brian V. Sengdala; Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work. American Music 1 October 2022; 40 (3): 347–362. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/19452349.40.3.05
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