Decolonization

Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritage-making process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of ‘difficult heritage’ can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten. Tak

BY 1945, EVERYWHERE ONE LOOKED IN THE FAR EAST THE BRITISH EMPIRE WAS BEING OPENLY QUESTIONED OR WAS FAILING OUTRIGHT. YET IN THE PREVIOUS CENTURY, THE BRITISH HAD BEEN THE PRE-EMINENT IMPERIAL POWER FROM WEIHAIWEI TO NORTH BORNEO. READING COLONIES: PROPERTY AND CONTROL OF THE BRITISH FAR EAST INVESTIGATES HOW THE BRITISH HELD ON FOR SO LONG. RENT CONTROL LEGISLATION, AND OTHER MEASURES OF PROPERTY LAW SUCH AS LAND IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES, ARE NOMINATED AS KEY TOOLS USED TO FRUSTRATE DECOLONIZATION IN MOST EASTERN COLONIES. BRITISH COLONIAL ADMINISTRATIONS TRIED LONG AND HARD TO INHIBIT THE DIALECTICAL DISCORD BETWEEN THEIR COLONIAL HIERARCHISM AND LOCAL FORMS OF NATIONALISM WITH THE PROMPTS AND PLAUDITS OF PROPERTY POLICY. IN CASES WHERE INDIGENOUS LANDLORDISM MASQUERADED AS PATRIOTISM, INDEPENDENCE CAME QUICKLY (CEYLON AND BURMA). WHERE PUBLIC HOUSING ESTABLISHED ITSELF AS A KEY POST-WAR PLANK OF SOCIAL POLICY, FREEDOM FROM BRITISH RULE WAS A MORE GRADUAL AFFAIR (BRITISH MALAYA