Conference Agenda

While studies examining the construct of “romantic childhood” and its mobilization in Cold War propaganda abound (e.g. May 2008; Dubinsky 2010; Grieve 2018), only a handful of articles have addressed the use of refugee children’s singing specifically (Woo 2015, 2020; Lee 2022), and none have, to my knowledge, deeply analyzed the refugee child’s voice as a specific construct. The proposed paper begins addressing this lacuna in scholarship by examining the role of the refugee child’s voice (real or imagined) in state-sponsored propaganda from the period. I take as my case study two US films, WTVJ’s The Plight of Pepito (1961) and the USIA’s The Lost Apple (1963), which purport to examine the perspectives and experiences of Cuban child refugees in the early 1960s. Drawing from Alexis Artaud de la Ferrière’s suggestion that constructs of “innocence” applied to children’s voices can act as a “moralizing” force within adults’ political messaging, I highlight the ways in which young refugees’ voices were muted, stolen, and structured through music and narrative to support political messaging. I contrast these analyses with oral history testimony about the literal and metaphoric silencing these young Cubans experienced upon arrival in the US. In so doing, I demonstrate that not only did these children suffer from what Y-Dang Troeung calls “refugee aphasia” (2022), but were further suffocated by the imagined tenets of romantic childhood itself, such as joy, adaptability, and innocence, which obfuscate individual agency and homogenize diverse experiences.

For over fifty years, Cambodian American experience has been articulated through myriad voices spanning Khmer speech, song, chant, recitation, and silence. Following the tumult of mid-20th century Cambodia foregrounded by the Khmer Rouge genocide from 1975 to 1979 and incited by the American bombing campaign during the late 1960s, two civil wars, and ensuing mass displacement, over 150,000 Cambodians arrived as refugees in the US. They carried with them the weight of trauma, fears and uncertainties, and hopes for life beyond violent rupture. They also carried with them voices as sonically and metaphorically resonant mediums through which to navigate identities in diaspora. Voices bearing Khmer language and song, stories, and religious practice helped to sustain Cambodian lifeworlds in diaspora. Informed by new turns in Critical Refugee Studies and over seven years of ethnographic research in the Cambodian American enclave of Lowell, Massachusetts, I consider the ways Cambodian Americans have used voice as a resource throughout un- and resettlements in three primary criteria: 1) vocalities of everyday life that actively resist the imposition of voicelessness as it stands for a lack of agency; 2) vocalities that sound beyond the traumatic past; and 3) the ways that vocality contributes to notions of permanency in a time when migrant emplacement is challenged by the isolationist policies of the Trump administration. I argue that centering resourcefulness embedded within uses of voice by refugees through and beyond the initial crises of displacement foregrounds an agentive solidarity often denied or ignored in state-centered frameworks of refuge.

Personal narrative storytelling is an artform that gains reality through the voice. Through their voice, a storyteller communicates the events, characters, images, and feelings of a memory.

Yet, when working to narrate a traumatic experience, people may run up against the “unspeakable.” In these cases, scholarship in voice studies, oral history, and feminist theory has focused on the role of the voice in communicating beyond and around language, through affective, timbral, material, and relational qualities that are themselves situated within sociocultural frameworks of voicing. This paper places ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine in conversation with approaches from studies in oral history, voice, feminist theory, affect and atmosphere, and Palestinian cultural practice to analyze one woman’s telling of a traumatic personal story in her own voice. By examining the storyteller’s and listeners’ vocalizations within the context of sociocultural frameworks around women’s vocal practices and the storyteller’s own reflections on her voice, I outline the politics of empathy that emerged through this storytelling moment. I argue that the corporeality of the storyteller’s voice allowed her listeners to feel alongside her, enabling an intimate and communally situated mode of bearing witness. This research therefore helps us to understand the complex dynamics through which voicing incites and shapes empathy and vice versa, molding not only what is said but how it sounds, how it is heard, and how it is felt.