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.
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 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.
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.
