Interactions with a violent past: Reading post-colonial landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

摘要

'When a memory is recalled like a car part from storage, there is no scientific certainty as to how it is put back, probably not as it was.' -Norman M. Klein, The history of forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory (Verso, 1997). Echoing Klein's work Ian Baird explains, 'We need to see memories as experiences that are not simply recalled, but rather produced and reproduced over time, and entwined with agency, so that in the end people are not simply recalling past acts, but are considering past productions and reproductions of the past' (p. 243). Within academia, there is a substantial amount of work on collective memory, but very little on how conflict areas shape it. This collection of essays addresses the lacuna by looking at the fluid process of collective memory for those who live in the post-conflict landscapes of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.