Dear HSHH friends,
Hope to see you at our next Human Sciences Happy Hours meeting !
Wednesday February 10 – 6pm – Baitong Restaurant
(7 st 360, near Beung Keng Kang market)
Contact:
Emiko Stock & Pascale Hancart-Petitet
012 521 093 – 092 399 273
hshhpp@gmail.com
Siti Keo will present:
A Tale of Two Cities: Soth Polin and Phnom Penh During Sangkum Reastr Niyum
From 1955 to 1970, Phnom Penh was a source of national pride for the
postcolonial Cambodian state. State newspapers featured articles and
pictures, highlighting Phnom Penh and its changes. The openings of a
luxurious hotel, a branch of a multinational business, or an
air-conditioned movie theater were seen as yet another sign of how
Phnom Penh was “in route to being one of the great cities of Asia.”
The newspapers boasted of how some of these new buildings incorporated
authentic Khmer architectural details and existed alongside old
colonial buildings. Phnom Penh’s growth signified, according to these
government newspapers, Cambodia’s ability to progress even as it
remained firmly rooted in tradition and in the past. The state used
Phnom Penh to build a bridge to its past, instilling a sense of pride
in the populace for the new direction of Cambodia. Therefore, Phnom
Penh was a crucial site for the enactment of Sangkum’s ideology and
for the construction of a modern, independent Cambodian nation.
However, social tensions emerged from the gaps that “opened up in this
period between Cambodia’s rich and poor and between the cities and the
countryside.” These tensions manifested itself across a variety of
mediums, from films to literature. The literary works of Soth Polin,
in particular, provided an outlet for these tensions and a means to
express the discontent against the government. The Phnom Penh that
was described in his novels differed radically from the one that
littered the pages of the government newspapers. Rather than the
Phnom Penh celebrated for its modernity and its embodiment of the
country’s progress, Soth Polin depicted it as a site of modern anomie,
a place from which to escape. For him, man became a machine in Phnom
Penh. By contradicting the state’s image of Phnom Penh and by
revealing the alienating consequences of urban life, Soth Polin’s
works challenged Sangkum’s representation of the city and its claimed
progress. The discontent within Sangkum Cambodia, exposed through
Soth Polin’s writings, later translated into political action against
Sihanouk in 1970. Either as a site of modernity or a place of
alienation, Phnom Penh played a central role in promoting the
political agendas of the state and of Soth Polin.
Siti Keo is a Ph.D. student at the University of California at
Berkeley. She studies Modern Southeast Asian History, with a focus on
Cambodian history. Her dissertation topic is the Urban History of
Phnom Penh during Sangkum Reastr Niyum (1955-1970).
–
Human Sciences Happy Hours in Phnom Penh
email: hshhpp@gmail.com
web: http://hshhpp.pbworks.com/
Coordinating team:
Emiko Stock, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Gabriel Fauveaud
