Interactions with a Violent Past Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam / edited by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe. [print]

Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.

Acknowledgements-- Introduction the "American war," post-conflict landscapes, and violent memories/ Oliver Tappe and Vatthana Pholsena-- National memorial sites and personal remembrance : remembering the dead of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek at the ECCC in Cambodia/ Sina Emde-- National lieu de memoire vs. multivocal memories : the case of Viengxay, Lao PDR/ Oliver Tappe-- War-martyr bia : commemoration and perdurability in rural Vietnam/ Markus Schlecker-- Laos : living with unexploded ordnance : past memories and present realities/ Elaine Russell-- War debris in postwar society : managing risk and uncertainty in the DMZ/ Christina Schwenkel-- A social reading of a post-conflict landscape : Route 9 in southern Laos/ Vatthana Pholsena-- Redefining Agent Orange, mitigating its impacts/ Susan Hammond-- Aesthetic forms of post-conflict memory : inspired vessels of memory in northeast Cambodia/ Krisna Uk-- Remembering old homelands : the Houay Ho Dam, the resettlement of the Heuny (Nya Heun), memory, and the struggle for places-- Ian G. Baird-- Bibliography-- Contributors-- Index.

There has been little research on the lasting impact of the violence of Second and Third Indochina Wars on local societies and populations, in Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Today's Lao, Vietnamese and Cambodian landscapes bear the imprint of competing violent ideologies and their perilous material manifestations. From battlefields and massively bombed terrain to reeducation camps and resettled villages, the past lingers on in the physical environment. The nine essays in this volume discuss post-conflict landscapes as contested spaces imbued with memory-work conveying differing interpretations of the recent past, expressed through material (even, monumental) objects, ritual performances, and oral narratives (or silences). While Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese landscapes are filled with tenacious traces of a violent past, creating an unsolicited and malevolent sense of place among their inhabitants, they can in turn be transformed by actions of resilient and resourceful local communities.