Southeast Asia. Interactions with a violent past: Reading post-colonial landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam Edited by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. Pp. 300. Maps, Tables, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Interactions with a violent past: Reading post-colonial landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam Edited by VATTHANA PHOLSENA and OLIVER TAPPE Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. Pp. 300. Maps, Tables, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000691 '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. Each essay provides details into the way that war-torn places become sites of memory, what Pierre Nora calls lieux de memoire. In this way, the collection provocatively showcases the symbiosis between people's identities and their war debris. Krisna Uk writes about artists and craftsmen who attribute new meanings and functions to war relics and their memories. The 70-year-old Cambodian funerary painter Keulagn Beuragn transforms horrifying memories of the bombing plane into aesthetic remembrances of those who died by it (pp. 223-8). Not only memories of the war, but war-riddled landscapes change in the post-conflict era. Vatthana Pholsena's account of Route 9 in southern Laos provides powerful descriptions of the lives of Sepon villagers who lived through the US war in Vietnam and its aftermath. Vietnamese soldiers and Royal Lao Army prisoners repaired the road in the postwar period, converting sites like a 'reeducation camp' where prisoners were tortured into an exhibition centre. Pholsena argues that beyond these governmental endeavours is a local social component. Villagers in Sepon see the reconstruction of the road as a marking of progress, civilisation, and development. In this way, they situate their own narrative within the road restoration 'in a historical timetable that followed their own recovery from the war' (p. 172). In her chapter on war debris in Vietnam, Christina Schwenkel writes about the international tourism that has developed for demilitarised zones (p. 149), but also notes the cultures that develop between 'professional' deminers and 'hobby' deminers who collect war debris at their own peril (p. 147). Here, people are not only redefining meaning with the war debris; in this example, war debris is part of the process in which people are redefining themselves. Perhaps one of the more physical and horrific examples of this comes from Susan Hammond's accounts of Agent Orange in Vietnam. The negligent manufacturing of the herbicide by US companies like Monsanto and Dow led to the devastation of thousands of people in addition to their ecology. …