Presented by Dr Caroline D. Laurent (KCL)

Recent years in France have seen the appearance of several comic books and graphic novels related to the Cambodian mass killings and genocide by the Khmers Rouges. Written mainly by indirect witnesses – that is individuals who did not directly experience the genocide – or even by direct witnesses but who do not remember what they saw, these graphic representations raise questions about the relation between memory and violence: how to write and transmit the memory of the Cambodian tragedy? In this presentation, I will be discussing how to remember and write genocide as an indirect witness by articulating my main approach around two specific graphic novels: Tian’s trilogy L’Année du Lièvre and Loo Hui Phang and Michaël Sterckeman’s Cent mille journées de prières. Because produced by members of the 1.5 generation defined by Susan R. Suleiman as children who have suffered an event’s consequences without possessing the understanding of an adult, and because of a shared feeling of absence, remembering becomes a complicated endeavor. The deficiency in the processes of remembering and transmission is thus the catalyst of attempts to artistically reconstruct a catastrophe almost without images, both through imagination and connections formed with previous violent events.

This a free event and open to all, registration is not required.