Browsing by Author "Jessica Jane Khuu"

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    Backscattered Scraps: Storytelling, History & Apocalypse in Supermodernity
    (University of Calgary, 2022) Jessica Jane Khuu
    Backscattered Scraps intertwines personal and collective memory, storytelling, and identity formation through a hybrid theoretical and creative approach. It first delves into the human experiences of World War II, the Cambodian genocide, and their aftermath, focussing on the oral histories of my family in these events. By juxtaposing these personal narratives with the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin and bell hooks, the thesis underscores the role of storytelling in preserving forgotten histories and shaping one’s identity in the present. The thesis further examines the unsettling phenomenon of The Backrooms, a modern internet horror story that reflects anxieties about abandoned spaces and apocalyptic possibilities. This concept is analyzed through Guy Debord’s idea of the spectacle, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias and Marc Augé’s concept of non-spaces in supermodernity. I address the link between our fear of The Backrooms and the horror my family experienced in the abandoned spaces of a war-torn country, arguing that both are closely linked to both the phenomena of non-spaces as well as the dissonance between sanitized media representations of death and the fragile lived experiences of loss embedded in oral storytelling. By integrating creative texts with academic analysis, the thesis argues for the preservation of experiential knowledge against the backdrop of modern desensitization to rapid consumption, mass production death, and the erosion of unwritten histories.