Memory,activism and the arts in Asia and the Pacific

Abstract

The emerging interest in the entanglements between memory, activism and social and political change is an exciting new direction in Memory Studies. This special issue aims to extend the repertoire of histories, cultural practices, and epistemologies from which theorizing about the memory-activism nexus is drawn through a focus on Asia and the Pacific, including diasporic communities in Australia. By centring engagements with memory in Asia as well as the Pacific, the issue opens new lines of inquiry.

The emerging interest in the entanglements between memory, activism and social and political change is an exciting new direction in Memory Studies (Gutman, 2017; Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2023; Katriel and Reading, 2015; Rigney, 2018). Scholars have begun to make sense of the ‘memory-activism nexus’ (Rigney, 2018) by exploring the interplay between memory activism: how activists produce cultural memory that aims to challenge hegemonic narratives (Gutman, 2017; Rigney, 2018: 372; Wüstenberg, 2017), the memory of activism: ‘how earlier struggles for a better world are culturally recollected’ (Rigney, 2020: 708; see also Katriel and Reading, 2015) and memory in activism: ‘how the cultural memory of earlier struggles informs new movements in the present’ (Rigney, 2020: 708). These approaches offer rich lines of inquiry to guide our understanding of memory and activism. Yet most of these foundational studies remain shaped by European experiences and frames of analysis.

This special issue aims to extend the repertoire of histories, cultural practices, and epistemologies from which theorizing about the memory-activism nexus is drawn through a focus on Asia and the Pacific, including diasporic communities in Australia. This collection does not aim to provide comprehensive geographic coverage of Asia and the Pacific, a massive and diverse region composed of distinctive cultures, political systems and complex histories. Instead, our goal is to explore how the interplay of political and aesthetic work shapes diverse articulations of the memory-activism nexus in specific Asian and Pacific contexts. We concur with Mary McCarthy (2024: 3) that the field of Memory Studies ‘has yet to fully integrate Asian perspectives’ and that the study of the region can inform new ‘empirical, theoretical and methodological approaches’. By centring engagements with memory in Asia as well as the Pacific, this issue aims to open new lines of inquiry.

This special issue is the product of collaboration and discussion that began in 2020, when a planned in-person conference at our institution, the Australian National University, had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, we established the MemoryHub@ANU as a forum to bring together scholars working on memory in Australia, Asia, and the Pacific and hosted four virtual seminars. The inaugural seminar in the series featured Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg (2023), in conversation with Shameem Black, Rosanne Kennedy and Lia Kent, discussing issues that emerged in planning and developing the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism. These seminars brought scholars and activists working on regions in Asia and the Pacific into dialogue both with Gutman and Wüstenberg, with each other and with online audiences, opening a broad conversation on the different strategies activists, artists, writers and others have been pioneering to bring difficult memories, often from recent conflicts, and sometimes in the context of authoritarian regimes, into public memory (https://rsha.cass.anu.edu.au/events/reimagining-memory-activism-conversations-asia-and-pacific-webinars-2021).

In promoting memory activism as a category of analysis, as opposed to a category of practice, Gutman and Wüstenberg (2023) deliberately offer a restrictive definition: memory activism is ‘the strategic commemoration of a contested past to achieve mnemonic or political change by working outside state channels’ (p. 5). They propose that the distinguishing feature of memory activism (compared to other forms of activism) is that it ‘target[s] memory as the crucial way of intervening in the process of societal change from below’ (Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2023: 6, italics in the original). Furthermore, they maintain that memory activists – whether supporting politically progressive or conservative causes and ideologies – work outside state channels and can thus be classified as grassroots rather than top down. They regard a tight definition as necessary for achieving ‘conceptual clarity’ (Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2023: 6) and providing a systematic basis for comparative analysis that will advance understandings of memory activism. This definition offers crucial benefits in the way that it encourages precise comparison across cases. It also actively unsettles the common assumption that memory activism is always progressive, allowing analysts to chart the structural similarities and distinctions between memory activists with competing values and goals.

While this special issue builds on foundational scholarship in the field from Gutman and Wüstenberg, Rigney, Katriel and Reading, and Altinay et al. (2019), we also introduce perspectives from disciplines and regions which expand this definition. By turning to histories and practices from Asia and the Pacific, we aim to explore different kinds of important work occurring within the memory-activism nexus that can sometimes problematize existing frameworks. We thus seek to expand conceptual engagement with memory activism in three major ways.

First, this issue embraces the complexity of memory activism in the context of the state. In some of this work, we chart continuities with the definition of memory activism as a practice that operates outside the channels of state memory practices. Many parts of Asia and the Pacific, marked by histories of colonialism, state violence, communal conflict and capitalist expansion, have experienced strong hegemonic memory work produced by the state. An ideologically divided Cold War environment, combined with unstable economic and political conditions, has defined the way these nation-states have sought to use memory practices to define political and national identity. As Kar Yen Leong (2023) has shown in his contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, in Southeast Asia, the challenge of ‘moulding unified societies out of disparate and plural communities’ (p. 325) in the wake of colonial rule gave rise to ‘monumental’ nation-building projects aimed at national unity. In South Asia, postcolonial nation-building has similarly been accompanied by a ‘search for political order through centralized, sovereign power within a homogeneous political community’ (Lewis, 2020: 17). Yet these state projects have excluded certain individuals, communities, experiences and forms of identity from the national community, often through violent means (as in the Suharto-era anti-leftist violence in Indonesia, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, and the genocide in Cambodia, among others). These exclusions have frequently delineated ‘hard boundaries between communities, defined by enmity and otherness’ (Lewis, 2020: 17) and have sometimes implicated members of different communities in forms of othering (Razdan, this issue). Memory activism in these contexts thus may seek to make visible narratives and experiences that have been silenced or pushed to the margins by the state (Hettiarachchi, this issue; Kodikara, this issue; Leong, 2023; McGregor and Dragojlovic, this issue).

Yet, we also expand our focus on memory activism to explore how the politics of memory in relation to the state may take a different form. In some cases, this is because the distinction between state channels and non-state channels may be blurred and complex. While this distinction seems straightforward, the term ‘state channels’ can have multiple referents. It can refer to different levels of state governance ranging from national to local, and these different levels can sometimes be in tension with one another. As Graefenstein and Kennedy in this issue show, memory activists can engage in negotiations with actors representing different levels of the state. Their work may be outside or in opposition to the state at one level, but inside or compatible with the state at another level. At some points, as Kodikara in this issue shows, the state can be highly personalized, with memory work directly addressed to specific individuals in power rather than to institutions or policies. A further complexity can be found in contexts where memories of contested histories are suppressed. In those contexts, there can be significant political risks to challenging state narratives and working outside state channels. The state can sometimes serve as a surveillant force with the potential to wield political consequences for actors and agents promoting memories deemed unwelcome or oppositional to the state regime. In such contexts, memory work designed to offer counter-perspectives may operate in much closer proximity to state narratives than they might in more open or democratic regimes where dissent is tolerated. Official narratives may also permeate and shape local social and political memories and forms of memory work, at least in part (Razdan, this issue; Zhu, this issue; Kent, this issue). As a result, when the insides and outsides of the state can be difficult to demarcate, state and non-state actors and narratives can be deeply entangled.

In yet other cases, the state is not the only or even the main interlocutor when it comes to memory. Activists may be interested in highlighting the continuities of colonialism and their related structures of power, including as they permeate state narratives (McGregor and Dragojlovic, this issue). Memory work can potentially be redirected to produce new connections between diverse local communities through processes of reciprocity (Graefenstein and Kennedy, this issue). In other cases, as Black’s conversation with Nayahamui Rooney (this issue) shows, memory work can be oriented to the needs of future generations in civil society. Problematizing such categories as local, regional or national, these analyses point to the multiple scales and interlocutors that can shape the politics of memory and the meaning of activism.

Our second main intervention turns to the arts, broadly understood, to reveal expanded understandings of what it might mean to be a memory activist. We use the concept of ‘arts’ as a broad, inclusive term to allow for the analysis of memory work through creative, multimedia and participatory practices of image-making, story-telling and political performance. In this issue, such images, stories and performances include commemorative statues, spectral performances, religious cursing, oral histories, folk museum collections, music performances, visual productions and textile weaving. The arts are significant, these articles show, because they operate through strong affective, aesthetic, and embodied logics that exceed conventional political discourse and ‘instrumental’ uses of memory even as they engage them (see Hughes, this issue). These practices haunt, mystify, provoke, trouble and connect their witnesses. Both literally and metaphorically, the arts of image-making, story-telling and political performance allow memory activists to activate forces and dialogues that can be beyond rational, state or even human control. They are often more oriented towards perspectives rather than policies, presenting such shifts as a critical step in the complex process of political and social change.

The arts and the memory-activism nexus has been a relatively underexplored area, yet there is inspiring work, especially by feminist memory activists in the global north and the global south, who have created artworks that bring into public visibility histories of atrocities and violations that have been systematically suppressed. In their collection Women Mobilizing Memory, the editorial collaborative worked across sites in the global north and global south to explore some of the strategies that women use ‘in combating the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions and new histories for future generations’ (Hirsch, 2019: 3). Contributors to this special issue build on this tradition of analysis. They raise questions about how memories are archived as artefacts and made available as resources for memory practices. They engage with image-making, story-telling and political performance as practices that may work to mediate difficult histories, complicate singular national narratives, foster the transmission of memory across generations, or enable pathways to healing. These practices may also disrupt peacebuilding or transitional justice processes that seek to impose premature frameworks of ‘moving on’ from complex legacies of violence and colonialism.

Third, we expand our understanding of memory activism by focusing on actors and institutions who do not necessarily consider themselves memory activists. The articles explore interventions, projects, actors, and practices that may sometimes be ambivalently connected to political activism or that operate in places where the state-non-state distinction is muddy. In so doing, these cases reveal the social and political significance of forms of memory work that have not traditionally been considered as part of the memory-activism nexus and encourage expanded understandings of how political and social change can take place.

These ambivalences around memory activism emerge in diverse conditions. In some cases, a reluctance to position or identity as an activist reflects the conditions of working within what, for many in this issue, are authoritarian regimes. Consequences for challenging official narratives can be more or less extreme, depending upon the governance regime, and may thus lead memory agents to develop less overtly activist orientations in their practice. Even where consequences are not extreme, local or state governments can shape public memory by simply refusing to allow memorial work in public space, in which case activists have to find other, often more ephemeral, means of commemorating disputed histories. Zhu (this issue) writes of how China, a single-party state, represents a ‘distinctive landscape of memory politics’ in which the ‘grand narratives of official memory’ are not necessarily directly challenged but are complicated in more subtle ways, including through the establishment of private museums that focus on local folk art and everyday experiences and stories. Kent’s and Hughes’ contributions to the special issue similarly explore how subtle forms of memory work, such as the gathering of the dead in Timor-Leste and musical performances to a spatially dispersed Cambodian diaspora, allow the haunting presence of restless spirits and official silences to be made present and negotiated in embodied and sometimes reparative ways. In other cases, as Black’s conversation with Nayahamui Rooney (this issue) reveals, the relational underpinnings and slow process of creative making prompt new ways of thinking, understanding, critiquing and crafting memory as a form of activism. While these makers of art may not always define themselves as activists in conventional terms of being part of organized collective movements, their processes of making, and the works they produce, intervene in major political conversations. We thus suggest the importance of drawing out the memory activist potential in works and actors who may not signal themselves as overtly oriented towards political change, yet who introduce important critical perspectives through their work with memory.

Structure of the special issue

The articles in this issue can be read productively in any order, but we have grouped them to draw out particular conceptual frames, rather than by region.

Expanding the conceptual lexicon of memory activism

The first four articles offer fresh theoretical perspectives on the memory-activism nexus. To acknowledge our location as special issue editors living and working on the unceded First Nations lands of Australia, we begin with Sulamith Graefenstein and Rosanne Kennedy’s analysis of a Korean ‘comfort woman’ statue and its connection to Australian First Nations communities. Exploring how activism may be unevenly in dialogue with different levels of the state, their article traces the history of this statue to show how an activist project that was originally conceptualized to bring about international-level change can evolve into a much more locally grounded intervention. They introduce the concept of ‘mnemonic reciprocity’ to explore interactions between memory activists in the Korean diaspora and members of the local Indigenous community in Sydney. Lia Kent further reorients the conventional approach to memory activism by exploring the dead as memory actors. Her focus is the widespread locally-led practices of gathering, reburying and remembering the dead who died during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which are prompted by peoples’ embodied and affective experiences of restless and unhappy spirits. While these practices are not forms of deliberate memory activism that confront the state, they unsettle dominant narratives of history and allow some of the silences of nation-and-state-building projects to be made partially present and negotiated. The dead, as they work on the living, ‘trouble the distinctions between the active and the passive, the subject and object, and the human and the more-than-human’ that underpin dominant conceptions of memory work and memory activism, offering insight into the ‘unexpected avenues through which social and political change can sometimes take place’.

The next two pieces examine the politically performative elements of memory work and memory activism from different scales. Rachel Hughes’ article draws out the capacity of the arts to provide an experience of ‘shared affective intensity’ that challenges a purely ‘instrumental’ reading of the arts (for instance, as a tool of peacebuilding or transitional justice). She focuses on a new symphonic work, Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia, that premiered in Melbourne, Australia, in October 2017. This piece sought to honour and bring rest to the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime of 1975–1999 and recognize Cambodians’ experiences of post-conflict exile. Drawing on Elisabeth Grosz’s (2008: 22) concept of ‘activation’, she explores how Bangsokol, as it worked through the bodies of performers, objects, images and sounds, afforded audiences an experience of ‘affective intensification’. This affective activation, she suggests, is a kind of ‘shared memory activism that is powerfully felt but remains largely un-authored, un-formed and un-thought’. Counterposing this approach is Chulani Kodikara’s analysis of the religious cursing practised by a woman who uses ritual curses to call the leaders of Sri Lanka to account for the forced disappearance of her husband. While, globally, women’s protests against the forced disappearances of kin have tended to present women as mourning victims who generate moral authority through their invocation of socially-sanctioned views of motherhood, the cursing practice creates a new religious frame for female authority over memory and generates a perpetrator-centric, rather than victim-centric, form of memory activism. Both Hughes and Kodikara show how performances can call on more-than-human forces to expand the vocabulary of memory activism.

Activating the archive

The next two articles, centred on oral histories, focus on the challenges of ‘activating the archive’ in contexts of exclusionary national narratives, ongoing structural violence and contested pasts. These works explore the processes that lead to the production of oral history memories related to violence, conflict and displacement. Radhika Hettiarachchi’s (this issue) article offers a personal reflection on her long-term involvement in two oral history projects that aimed to make visible women’s marginalized memories that could ‘challenge the pervasive and dominant state narrativization of the 26-year Sri Lankan civil war and its aftermath’ and foster a more community-centred public discourse on peacebuilding by ‘memorializing their life experiences before, during and after the war’. Focusing on the challenges of returning to the women a decade on to renew their consent for a new public iteration of their narratives, she reflects on how power asymmetries and ‘macro-narratives’ frame how stories are told, to whom and for what purpose consent is given. She challenges memory activists and archivists to reflect on these power asymmetries and find ways to dismantle them, at least partially, by making archives accessible to those who narrate their stories.

Aditi Razdan examines the oral narratives of diasporic Kashmiris in Australia as they remember political acts of violence in Kashmir during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when Kashmir’s Hindu Pandit community was displaced. Her article explores how Pandit and Muslim memories of this event and its aftermath are often shaped by broader metanarratives of violence and marginalization. Building on Michael Rothberg’s (2019) concept of the ‘implicated subject’, or the subject who does not directly commit violations but is implicated in the broader inequalities that give rise to violence, this article explores how oral history memories can emerge through larger metanarratives that prevent recognition of such implication. This form of memory-making creates an archive that may not necessarily work towards reconciliatory or reparative processes. Such oral histories suggest some of the tensions and ambivalences within forms of memory activism and hint at the importance of understanding how actions may be blocked or foreclosed.

Problematizing the local

Many contributions to this issue take up, and complicate, the idea of the local as a focal point for memory activism. They seek to ‘centre’ experiences and places that are regarded, in colonial and postcolonial imaginaries, as peripheral, while they show how these seemingly peripheral spaces are actually crucial nodes within colonial and capitalist global histories and systems. Often ambivalently or indirectly activist, the arts of memory work figured in these local/global systems frequently challenge national discourses through the multiplicities of memory and the new relationalities they encourage. This final group of articles investigates how practices of image-making, story-telling and political performance can problematize categories of local and national memory. Yujie Zhu’s article complicates the idea of local memory as oppositional to national memory by exploring the interplay between the local and the national in China through a study of a private museum in Yan’an. He suggests that while local governments actively promote official sites of memory in Yan’an as the roots of Chinese communism for patriotic education of the Chinese public, the private museum offers an alternative form of public space for social gatherings and memory transmission. Instead of promoting a grand narrative of the founding of the nation, the private museum focuses on local folk arts and the representation of the everyday landscape in response to rapid social change. Private museums do not emerge from radical social movements that challenge dominant historical narratives dictated by ruling elites. As Zhu argues, ‘Instead, they provide space for local communities to engage in negotiation, communication and occasional compromise within the confines of official constraints’.

Katharine McGregor and Ana Dragojlovic’s article similarly complicates the idea of ‘local’ memory work by focusing on a translocal memory project in Indonesia that engages with the little-known Banda massacres by the United East India Trading Company, the lingering traces of the ‘spice trade’, and of colonial conquest in the Banda Islands. Challenging colonial and state assumptions that the Banda Islands are remote, peripheral and insignificant, this contribution shows their centrality within colonial and capitalist circuits as well as their potential for translocal connections to other regions of the Indonesian archipelago. The multimedia project, the Banda Journal, produced by two Indonesian documentary makers from West Sumatra, Indonesia is, they suggest, a complex example of contemporary Indonesian decolonial memory activism that is ‘invested in disrupting both Indonesian and the Dutch state narratives about the Banda massacres and pointing to the wider implications of injustices related to the spice trade’. Like the local museums that Zhu analyses, this multimedia project does not directly call for political change; rather, it illuminates the ongoing nature of colonialism and coloniality and related structures of power. It challenges romanticized images of the link between the spice trade and the Dutch Golden Age while it also moves beyond nationalist framings of Indonesian history and connects the Banda massacres to histories of global capitalism and economic exploitation. These articles thus show how memory activism, through the interpretative possibilities of museum collections and multimedia productions, can prompt new reckonings with the interconnections of local, regional, national and international scales of memory.

We conclude this issue with Shameem Black’s interview with Nayahamui Rooney, which focuses on how memory, the arts and activism can emerge in non-linear and recursive ways throughout a scholar’s journey. This conversation explores Rooney’s multidisciplinary research on gender, violence and power on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea through the practice of weaving a basket. The social practice and epistemological foundations of basket-making, Rooney shows, offer a new way to centre Indigenous Manus Island voices within political debates where they have often been disregarded. This practice of slow weaving, embedded in community relations, provides the opportunity for Rooney to intervene in political discourse concerning Australia’s refugee processing centre on Manus Island. As Rooney (this issue) shows, making a basket serves as the literal and metaphoric ‘making of social fabric’ that can offer a ‘quiet way of being in an activist space’. The basket comes to signify an alternative form of political history that provides the foundation for a memory practice that will be needed by future generations on Manus.

Conclusion

By leaning into the ambiguities and ambivalences of memory activism in Asian, Pacific and Australian contexts, this special issue gestures towards the rich range of possible ways in which images, stories and performances contribute to the political potential of memory. In contexts where relations between state authority and civil society may be fluid or entangled, as well as contexts where direct forms of protest against the state are difficult, the meaning of memory activism will look distinctly different. Articles in this issue have articulated innovative genres of commemoration for justice that emerge through the cultural resources of local actors, ranging from religious curses in Sri Lanka to musical performances for the Cambodian diaspora to museums in China to the work of the dead in Timor-Leste, among others. Frequently, the images, stories and performances that shape memory practices offer a counterforce to states’ active practices of repression and forgetting, even as they can also be enmeshed with different levels of state discourse. These investigations explore the gendered nature of memory activism, showing how different actors draw upon locally nuanced repertoires of creative practices and performance traditions to articulate gendered voices that are often erased from public discourse. These articles show how memories of entangled colonial histories and transnational movements of peoples across sites in Asia, the Pacific, and the broader region that includes Australia and New Zealand, are imagined and mobilized for diverse ends.

By bringing the dynamic – yet under-researched – entanglements among memory, activism and arts in Asia and the Pacific into focus, the special issue seeks to offer theoretical, empirical and methodological insights to the field of memory studies. Within the range of voices in this issue, readers will gain the perspectives of both scholars and practitioners who are involved in activist and artistic memory initiatives in the region and beyond. Through close engagement with currents and developments in this region, these articles seek to extend and enrich existing paradigms and debates.