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The Production of Shared Space: Notes on Indonesian Migrant Workers in Hong Kong and Japan

Our modern world is often characterized as fluid, in which the flow of capital, the stream of people and the flood of products follow multiple paths to keep the pulse of our modern life beating. Mobility of people and objects is clearly [...]
Sculpting and Casting Memory and History in a Northern Thai City

Monuments and statues have long been popular among states seeking to define collective memory. Such obsession with statuary commemoration has even been described by some as a sort of ‘statuemania’, an ailment of national elites and [...]
Parasites’ Paradise: The Erasure of Memory in Dang Nhat Minh’s ‘The House of Guava (Mùa ỏ̂i)’

Memory, mourning, and melancholia figure prominently in the films of Dang Nhat Minh, Vietnam’s national film director and scriptwriter. Born in Hue in 1938, Dang studied in the Soviet Union where he was introduced to filmmaking (Cohen, [...]
Counter-memory: Replaying Political Violence in Thai Digital Cinema

Central to the Thai term for memory khwamsongcham = ความทรงจำ is song, which literally translates as form or medium. The word khwamsongcham in itself forges an embodiment of the past (albeit always interpreted), and [...]
Mobile / immobile bodies: recollections of growing up in times of upheaval

Reports and images broadcast in international news media on the “the refugee crisis” and particularly the exodus of Syrian men, women, and children escaping their country’s civil war over the past several months have elicited [...]
Potent Places as Embodied Memory in Cambodia

Commenting on sociologist Maurice Halbwach’s (1925) influential theoretical essay on memory, Paul Connerton declared that continuing to speak of “collective memory” required recognition that the term subsumed “quite simply facts of [...]

Memory Thickness: Presenting Southeast Asian Pasts

The research featured in this issue of Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia offers fresh insights into the places and tactile traces of memory in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and diaspora. Versed in distinct vocabularies of remembrance, our contributors destabilize official discourses and political constructs through innovative analyses of diverse vehicles of memory. Their discrete vistas on Southeast Asian memory disrupt homogenizing discourses – whether theoretical or official – with innovative analyses grounded in specific vocabularies, whether linguistic or aesthetic. [...]

REVIEW— Basagan ng Trip: Complaints About Philippine Culture and Politics

Basagan ng Trip makes theorizing and “discourse” chic. In the Preface, Lisandro E. Claudio notes that “Walang basagan ng trip” mirrors an “anti-critic tradition in Philippine arts” (p. ix). Through this lens, the Filipino psyche encourages creation and discourages criticism as this ruins the vibe of the imaginative process that produces something new. [...]
REVIEW— Mata Hati Kita, The Eyes of Our Hearts
REVIEW— Muhammadiyah Jawa
Review— 从文化视角看大湄公河次区域合作《评大湄公河次区域五国文化发展的体制机制研究》
REVIEW— On Five Short Films by Wregas Bhanuteja

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