Dissonant commemorations and multiple temporalities: Memorials to Ho Chi Minh in northeastern Thailand

Dissonant commemorations and multiple temporalities: Memorials to Ho Chi Minh in northeastern Thailand

SYNOPSIS

In 1928, Ho Chi Minh arrived in Siam with the goal of setting up revolutionary bases with the help of Vietnamese migrants in the northeast of the country, close to Vietnam but located beyond the reach of French security services. His journeys across this region have become material for commemorations in places where he is believed to have stayed. This talk is about one such place: a village located in the province of Nakhon Phanom on the Lao-Thai border. In 2001 and 2016, in remembrance of his sojourn in the village, two memorial sites – the Ho Chi Minh House and the Ho Chi Minh Memorial, respectively – were built to celebrate Ho Chi Minh’s life and achievements. However, an examination of these memorials reveals a commemorative dissonance. Instead of complementing each other mnemonically, these memorials differ significantly: one is present-focused, yet also future-oriented; the other is a vehicle for a memory of a semi-fictional past. Why and how has the same event been represented so differently? The concept of ‘sites of memory’ where the past is commemorated and reinterpreted in the light of the present is not particularly helpful. To answer this question, I suggest that it is more useful to think in terms of plurality of temporalities. Three notions of time intersect in the remembrance of Ho Chi Minh in Nakhon Phanom: 1) the temporality of the event that is the raison d’être of the Ho Chi Minh House; 2) the homogeneous time that the Ho Chi Minh Memorial aims to reflect; and 3) the discontinuous temporality that characterizes the approach to the past and present of Thai-Vietnamese people involved in the Ho Chi Minh Memorial. This plurality of temporalities makes it difficult to investigate the past of the area even after the end of the Cold War in Asia.

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Vatthana Pholsena is an Associate Professor in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. She first came to Singapore in 2002 on a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute. Subsequently, she has worked as a Research Fellow in the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) based at the Southeast Asia Centre (Centre Asie du Sud-Est) in Paris. Her current research focuses on the afterlife of the Cold War in the Lao-Thai borderlands.

 

REGISTRATION

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Date
Wednesday, 27 January 2021

Time
3.00pm to 4.30pm (Singapore Time)

Venue
via Zoom