Southeast Asia has been witness to a multitude of violent conflicts over the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. This conceptual paper is the introduction to a special issue on ‘Postmemory work and the digital in Southeast Asia’ that explores how, within its distinctive historical, sociopolitical and media contexts, the digital is being used by predominantly young actors — the so-called postmemory generation — to remember, contest and reimagine violent pasts. The article aims to prepare the conceptual ground for the contributions to follow, but also more generally for future research looking into postmemory work and the digital in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Japanese people have a strong affinity for Southeast Asia as a region, yet they often know very little about it. This is particularly true for students in Japanese universities. The issue lies in the gap between what students believe they know and what they actually understand about Southeast Asia. This is concerning because perceptions based on a superficial understanding of the facts are vulnerable to political mood swings and propaganda, which can undermine sound judgements in international relations. It is not unreasonable to expect students at top schools, who are interested enough in the region to take related courses, to develop a deeper understanding. This paper approaches the problem from two angles: first, it reviews the evolution of scholarly literature on Southeast Asia in Japan, analysing the characteristics of the Japanese approach to Southeast Asian studies. Second, it traces the educational background of Japanese youth to examine how scholarly culture has influenced education from high school to college level. In doing so, we problematise the global perceptions of ordinary Japanese citizens and attempt to explain the disconnect between poor knowledge and rich awareness. We argue that a structural issue between the production and consumption of knowledge must be addressed.

The microhistories of three Teochew-Catholic parishes in Singapore challenge notions of localisation as conceived of in the studies of overseas Chinese diasporas. Despite hailing from the Guangdong province of China, these Catholic migrants reached Singapore under a myriad of circumstances, and the Catholic Church played a pivotal role in their coping with the experiences of migration. Triangulating between ecclesiastical archives, oral history interviews, and commemorative artefacts, this paper highlights three separate experiences of mobility between China and Singapore between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: of sojourning, long-term migration, and refugees. Differing experiences hence prompted divergent modes of localisation, resulting in disassociation amongst fellow Teochew-Catholics. Even though Catholicism and similar geographical origins in China provided commonalities amongst these Teochew-Catholics, the dynamics of migrant-mission interactions contrasted drastically across the three parishes, resulting in distinctive traditions and communal identities. Rather than a single Teochew-Catholic community, these parishes evidence three localised overseas Chinese communities within the island of Singapore. The paper hence problematises understanding localisation across national boundaries and cultural assimilation, advocating for an experience-based model of analysis and inviting further comparisons across communities in Southeast Asia.

The Khmer Republic (1970–1975) is generally remembered as a shell state, a by-product of the Vietnam War in the hands of the Americans. Marginalised in academic research, the republican regime has left a limited and scattered hard archive of memoirs, official records, publications, newsreels and pictures. Against this backdrop, this paper tries to assess the space the digital provides to Khmers in Cambodia and the diaspora to articulate their memories of the Khmer Republic and the civil war. It also seeks to analyse both the kind of tools the digital gives to researchers to extend this archive and the ways in which this expanded or hybrid archive may support forms of activism. To do so, this paper looks at a selected set of 30 videos of the Khmer Republic on YouTube and their comments and explores the affective, historiographical and political dimensions of online memory practices. Through this analysis, it proposes postmemory not only as a topic to be investigated, but also as a research practice central to the generation of a critical archive of that period in Cambodia.

Timor–Leste’s independence generation are recording theirs visions of the future, challenging past inequalities. Here the concept of ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 2007) is brought into conversation with reproductive justice, exploring how these two theoretical concepts and their applied practice, can be generative. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016–2026 this paper analyses performances from youth groups reccorded by local radio journalists. Here I argue that (post)memory work may be a considered a form of reproductive justice in praxis. The digital as a reproductive medium is part of this praxis as a tool of communication and replication. The digital serves as a space for remembering, reimagining and reproducing a more equal and just future. As present the possibilities of this are constrained by equal access to digital resources, which is undergoing rapid change.

The Cijiao is a Chinese sectarian religion founded during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960). Contrary to the common perception of East Asia as the cradle of Chinese religious movements, this study examines a movement that originated in colonial Malaya and subsequently spread to North America and China since the latter half of the twentieth century. This article proposes that different forms of migration and mobility among Malaysians and Singaporeans were quintessential to the Cijiao’s development within Southeast Asia and abroad. It argues that these diverse channels, methods, and periods of travel not only offered new avenues for the movement’s expansion but also generated novel dynamics and reshaped this religious network. As such, the extension of the Cijiao’s global reach cannot be solely understood through the lens of a single locality. Instead, it must be seen as arising from prolonged engagement with cultural currents and competing interests spanning diverse global regions.

This article analyses vernacular discourses of war memory in user commentary on the 1945 Battle of Manila on YouTube. This pivotal yet overlooked event of the Pacific War resulted in unprecedented casualties and infrastructure damage in the Philippines. Our sequential mixed-method analysis of user commentary on selected videos identified a predominant focus on postmemory sharing and infrastructure destruction, with little intersection with discussions of justice and accountability. We argue that overlooking the battle’s human cost as a matter of justice contributes to its marginalisation in collective memory, highlighting a failure to acknowledge the conflict’s broader historical and ethical implications.

This article reconstructs an eighteenth-century legal dispute involving piracy between two Chinese captains in the Gulf of Siam. In an unprecedented move, Mo Tianci (Mạc Thiên Tứ), the ruler of Hà Tiên, delegated judicial authority over the case to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Batavia. This decision reveals his deliberate strategy to integrate into the Company’s sphere of influence to bolster security and trade. Hà Tiên’s agility in navigating multiple sovereignties was essential to its continued prosperity as a commercial crossroads. The Mo’s historical trajectory also illustrates the growing influence of Western power in maritime Asia’s geopolitical order.

Current research on the Second Indochina War has largely focused on memory narratives of prominent figures and institutions while overlooking the lived experiences of Vietnamese people. As a work of autoethnography, this paper tells reflective stories about my Vietnamese Australian family and our use of digital and non-digital media to construct memories of the War both in Việt Nam and Australia. These stories bring forth important nuances of intergenerational and transnational memories rooted in the legacies of the War and the expansion of global digitality. This paper contributes to the shift towards storytelling, personal and family histories, and (auto)ethnography as innovative ways to study post-conflict memories in digital and non-digital spaces.

In 1621, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) conquered the Banda Islands (Maluku, Indonesia) and killed, expelled and enslaved its indigenous population. The motivation behind this genocide was to establish control over the production of nutmeg and mace, two valuable spices that were grown almost exclusively in Banda. According to most historians, the VOC was successful in radically transforming, intensifying and, rationalising spice production. This paper, by contrast, argues that there was a significant degree of continuity in cultivation methods between the precolonial and (early) colonial periods and that productivity levels stagnated or declined following colonisation.

This article examines how digital media in Myanmar enables postmemory transmission amid Ethno-political conflict. Using Hirsch’s concept, I analyse how rights activists and Ethnic Armed Organisations employ postmemory work to construct belonging. Based on Yangon fieldwork (2019–2020), the study contrasts two modes: one transcending Ethnic boundaries through shared oppression narratives, another reinforcing Ethnic distinctions. A digital rights activist links minority persecution with activists’ suffering, creating cross-ethnic solidarities. Conversely, the YouTube film The Way of Rakhita mobilises postmemory to affirm Rakhine identity and armed struggle. Conceptualising postmemory as transmission clarifies how memory work perpetuates conflict or generates inclusive belonging.

Between 1900 and 1950, colonial Malaya suffered a series of difficulties including trade supply disruptions, economic downturns, warfare and harvest failures. These resulted in short to long-term impacts on the availability of locally produced or imported food, especially rice. Small-scale market gardening and home vegetable growing became critical avenues to ameliorating shortfalls. The subject of vegetable gardening as a means of everyday or crisis subsistence has been little attended to in the Asian context, yet, local vegetable growing played an important role in managing food insecurity, even making the difference between life and death. Taking colonial Malaya as a case-study, this article investigates how small-scale vegetable farming and market gardening were methods of subsistence during periods of minor to acute food insecurity and a means of decreasing reliance on imports. This relatively untapped history reveals government-led strategies to increase food production, including ones that created conflict with communities or individuals already producing their own food. It argues that colonialism had in fact created many of the insecurities that the government now sought to address, and that the production of food was closely connected to — and reinforced — the colonial governments perceptions and stereotypes of different Malayan peoples.

While Malay Hikayat texts are composed along oral-oriented sensibilities or otherwise originate in the oral medium, what survives of their past recitations are but scant written records of them. Scholars working under these evidentiary limits have often seized on these texts’ fantastical elements to interpret them as myths. I suggest that such flawed interpretations are found on visual readings that ignore Hikayat texts’ oral poetics; and consider instead how a text is historical insofar as its medium is germane to its historical poetics. I demonstrate a methodology to unread Hikaya and re-situate them in their oral medium in which texts were liable to change over time, to appreciate their historicity. In unreading the Hikayat Anggun Cik Tunggal, this article recovers a history which retold Minangkabau experiences of colonialism through the memory of the 1511 Portuguese invasion of Melaka. Finally, I trace the Hikayat into an age of print colonialism, in which print formed a key technology by which European colonists re-moulded meaning-making and intellectual life in the Malay world. By these mores of media consumption, Malay readers came to interpret Hikayat as fictions, and were wrested from a long tradition of history-telling that enabled them to process colonial trauma.

A pyramidal composite of figures standing 18 metres high, Manila’s People Power Monument commemorates the events of the 1986 People Power Revolution, in which over a million people gathered to bring to an end the 20-year-long dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. Designed by Philippine sculptor Eduardo Castrillo in 1993, the monument stands at the site on which the protestors converged and has become the focal point of public commemorations, which take place annually from the 22 to 25 February to mark the anniversary of the revolution. This article examines the ways in which digital memory work around the People Power Monument is used to reconnect with the past and to both contest and support the Marcos family following the 2022 election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the presidency.

Amidst the upheaval of the Second World War between 1939 and 1942, renowned Chinese artist Xu Beihong embarked on a journey across Singapore, India, and Malaya, one which would leave an indelible mark on his artistic career. While existing studies typically frame this phase as Xu Beihong’s Nanyang period and foreground his patriotic fundraising endeavours and contributions to China’s War of Resistance Against Japan, his nearly year-long sojourn in India is overshadowed by these fundraising accounts. Drawing on newly discovered primary sources, this study conducts a comparative analysis to explore overlooked aspects such as his everyday linguistic practices, social networks and markedly divergent artistic outputs across the two regions. By examining Xu’s different attitudes towards South and Southeast Asia, this research highlights the limitations of nationalist or bilateral frameworks for interpreting intra-Asian artistic interaction. It also reveals the intricate power dynamics within overseas Chinese communities during the Second World War, which not only shaped the diverse cultural landscape of both regions but also consolidated hierarchies beneath a rhetoric of resistance and solidarity. Through this comparative lens, the study exposes a deeper layer of inequality that foreshadowed regional divergences on the eve of decolonisation.

This article provides a concise overview of the history of environmental change in Borneo since 1970, with particular attention to human institutions, actors, and choices, and to the reasons for those choices. It is a political narrative, with an eye for vested interests and for the forces resisting environmental change as well as those driving it. The article deals with the whole of Borneo, including Indonesian Kalimantan, the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, and the sultanate of Brunei, highlighting parallels and contrasts between their trajectories. In the late twentieth century the appearance of large international markets for tropical timber and palm oil changed the ecological fate of Borneo, leading to an almost uniquely rapid process of environmental destruction. In the early twenty-first century a combination of incipient timber and land exhaustion, stagnating palm oil prices (2010–20), and an internationalisation and monetisation of conservation efforts has slowed down the rate of deforestation. But the close involvement of Indonesian and East Malaysian political elites in extractive industries makes it unlikely that a reversal is imminent. Even if some ecosystem restoration can now be envisaged, the fact that this is most likely to take place under the stewardship of big business raises uncomfortable ethical questions.