London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 222 pp. (B&W photos.) US$49.00, ebook. ISBN 9781003242253.
Scholarship in memory studies has been booming over the past decades, to the point that some historians have questioned if the term “memory” is being abused, much as “culture” was in the 1970s (“Trans-Asian Mnemoscapes: Rethinking the Politics of Memory in Asia and Beyond,” the Critical Global Studies Institute conference, Sogang University, Seoul, June 20–23, 2023). Combining these two loaded terms, this edited volume Cultures of Memory in Asia does not directly address that critical question, but instead presents the reader with various forms of memory and diverse ways of studying memory, with a focus on Asia. Including the most obvious, concrete sites such as Tiananmen Square, as well as fictional places such as Mengkerang, the authors of the volume examine a variety of “cultural work” dedicated to contested memory. The volume is composed of eight chapters that explore the dynamism of memory through such things as memorial sites, statues, visual art, literature, photography, and cinema, and ranging in geographical coverage across Southeast and Northeast Asia. It is certainly not possible for one volume to exhaust the vast historiography of Asia; for example, Central Asia and South Asia are not discussed. Organized as it is by forms of memorialization, however, this weakness in terms of geographical coverage is not a critical shortcoming.
The goal of the volume, as its editor Chieh-Hsiang Wu notes, is to provide a timely cultural study of memory about and from Asia. The authors of the various chapters testify to the difficulty of studying memory and the memorialization of traumatic events in Asia while many are themselves living amidst ongoing political turmoil. With this in mind, it is easier for the reader to understand why the chapters embody what they aim to study—the struggle to remember, as Ja Ian Chong so nicely expresses it in the book’s introductory chapter.
The chapters in the volume, though written in a variety of styles and with different theoretical underpinnings, at least agree at recognizing the dynamism of memory; that is, that memory is mostly fragmented, inevitably selective, at time self-conflicting, and carries the potential to present a non-linear (re)telling of the past. In this light, these studies focus on the processual character of memory—memory not as a reproduction (or representation) of the past, but rather as a constructive or even creative relationship with the past. Here, the term “creative” might seem to undermine the reliability of memory. On the contrary, recognizing the inevitability of memory politics, the authors of this edited volume are mostly concerned with how art can bring forth the critical aspect of memory as a political project in which those who suffer are able to find expression, be heard, and hopefully heal, rather than having memory serve merely as testimony of a time past. The authors pose such questions as how can art effectively dissolve the boundaries between reality and fiction (for example, in the case of Au Sow-Yee’s Kris Project, an art project exploring the politics of fluctuating borders within Southeast Asia).
Meanwhile, in favor of a rather individualist perspective on memory over collective memory, most authors question the contemporary tendency to abuse the moral politics surrounding memory. The authors collected here differ in their attitudes towards the ethics of memory—that is, that the obligation to remember is not a moral but an ethical one, as Avishai Margalit argued (Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), and therefore, these authors have different expectations of the role of the state in commemorating the past. Without totally rejecting the state, some hesitate to fully support any state-led project of remembering, despite the historic significance of such recognition. For example, in the case of transitional justice in Taiwan or South Korea, some authors are more directly critical of state intervention in the politics of memory (especially when it comes to remembering state violence, as in the case of Mikyoung Kim’s chapter, “Cultural Memories of State Violence: A Compararive Study of Kwangju and Hiroshima”), and go beyond the ethics of memory to focus on issues of individual freedom and existence. Their critical views towards memory initiatives are intersected by the heterogenous representation of memory, contributing to possibilities of memory work that challenge again and again the relationship between creativity, individual memory, and collective memory that are inevitably entwined with group identity.
Despite the value of this edited volume, some readers may be left wondering what coherent message the authors are hoping to convey. The collection’s final chapter (Huang Han-yu’s “The Politics and Promise of Memory: The White Terror in Taiwan as Example”), seems to offer a potential unifying theme. It provides a philosophical overview of the conflicts and dilemmas the lie beneath the promotion of transitional justice by the nation-state, considering how a fundamental operating reality of the state is its exclusive hold on violence. Huang’s chapter can serve as a conclusion urging further studies that go beyond the normalized, legalized practice of justice and reconciliation. Therefore, cinema, art, and literature as fictional narratives have the potential to play more important roles as both testimony and criticisms of historical events. Writers and artists, nevertheless, might wish to reject sheer victimhood in favor of maintaining their individualist ethics of freedom (as seen in the case of Shao Yuh-Chuan’s study of the literary works of Gao Xingjian that comprises chapter 7), while readers in our post-memory era are likely to roam about with a prosthetic memory in the consumption of mass culture. Cultures of Memory in Asia exposes the relationship between aesthetics and testimony but does not provide one clear answer to the question it broaches—the dynamism of memory and how to study memory in Asia. Perhaps this is inevitable given the authors’ commitment to presenting stories of struggle over memory and their refusal to weaponize memory. This volume will prove an important reference for scholars in memory studies, museum studies, visual arts, and Asian studies seeking to unpack how effective expression and testimony is inextricably linked with the inherent fluidity of memory work as a dynamic process rather than as finalized product. Students and practitioners who are enthusiastic about the cultural work of memory certainly do not want to miss the studies in this volume.
Shu-Mei Huang
National Taiwan University, Taipei