This article concerns how heritage pertaining to the Second World War (1941–1945), as this has been made manifest in the urban environments of Perak, Malaysia, is (de)valued and (mis) assessed over multiple scales within the state. After foregrounding the biases associated with official depictions of the event, it excavates the ways informal actors have sought to overturn the collective amnesia of the state by creating heritages “in the shadows” and/or pushing for public recognition of formally occluded pasts. In doing so, the article argues for the salience of academics and policymakers alike, taking more seriously these non-state efforts, while also evidencing informal heritage-making as itself prone to limits and (not always altruistic) motives, which render their valuation as incomplete as formal efforts at remembering. More broadly, the article argues for the need to pay more attention to heritage-making “from below” in valuations of urban environments, but it cautions against treating them as more than what they are, that is, pasts as presenced by someone else.
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