Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia applies a new theoretical literature on social memory to remembered events in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Highlighting connections between theorizing based on European examples and unresolved memory issues in East and Southeast Asia, the authors show how comparative study of the interpenetration of politics and lived bodily experience, of communal and personal memories, and of dominant and suppressed narratives, can yield insights into the human potential to become either perpetrators, victims or bystanders.

The memories found within different groups in any society are open to negotiation, suppression, contestation, or revision in the ever-evolving politics of the present. The searching and close-grained analyses of contemporary issues found in the volume vividly illustrate the essentially plural and multivocal nature of social memories, and demonstrate the intricate connection between transnational, national and sub-national politics. Readers seeking a more nuanced and complex understanding of the past and of its continued relevance to the present and future, will find here much food for thought.

Roxana Waterson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore.
Kwok Kian-Woon is an Associate Professor in the Division of Sociology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Réf. : Roxana Waterson and Kwok Kian-Woon (eds), Contestations of memory in Southeast Asia, Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2012.

Source : NUS

Table of contents :

• The work of memory and the unfinished past, deepening and widening the study of memory in Southeast Asia / Roxana Waterson and Kwok Kian-Woon

• Remembering kings, archives, resistance, and memory in colonial and post-colonial Burma / Maitrii Aung-Thwin

• Shifting visions of the past, ethnic minorities and the ‘struggle for national independence’ in Laos / Vatthana Pholsena

• Truth and memory, narrating Viet Nam / Sharon Seah Li-Lian

• Textual construction of a nation, the use of merger and separation / Dayang Istiaisyah bte Hussin

• Remembering, misremembering, and forgetting, the struggle over Serangan Oemoem 1 Maret 1949 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia / Heddy Shri Ahimsa Putra

• War and violence, history and memory, the Philippine experience of the Second World War / Ricardo T. José

• The past in the present, memories of the 1964 ‘racial riots’ in Singapore / Adeline Low Hwee Cheng

• Memories at the margins, Chinese-educated intellectuals in Singapore / Kwok Kian-Woon and Kelvin Chia

• Living with the spectre of the past, traumatic experiences among wives of former political prisoners of the ‘1965 event’ in Indonesia / Budiawan

indomemoires

More Posts