Shu-Mei Huang - Heritage, Memory, and Punishment

Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee provide a new, East Asian, and transnational take on prisons as places of pain and shame a major contribution to the heritage literature. They analyze the building of prisons by colonial Japan in China, Korea, and Taiwan and their rebirth as heritage sites designed to restore national honor and strengthen national cohesion. The authors show, nevertheless, that the sites remain caught up in shifting regional geopolitics, their multiple interpretations generating international tensions that can only be resolved at the diplomatic level.

William Logan, Professor Emeritus,
Deakin University, Australia

Sites of Japans colonial incarceration relate to both the authority of geography and the power of heritage history. Huang and Lee both demonstrate in their groundbreaking volume how these often punitive forms of colonial modernity were then later consumed, reshaped, or destroyed in the ensuing years of national and international debates about the legacies of empire.

Barak Kushner, Professor of East Asian History,
University of Cambridge, UK

Heritage, Memory, and Punishment

Based on a transnational study of decommissioned, postcolonial prisons in Taiwan (Taipei and Chiayi), South Korea (Seoul), and China (Lushun), this book offers a critical reading of prisons as a particular colonial product, the current restoration of which as national heritage is closely related to the evolving conceptualization of punishment. Focusing on the colonial prisons built by the Japanese Empire in the first half of the twentieth century, it illuminates how punishment has been considered a subject of modernization, while the contemporary use of prisons as heritage tends to reduce the process of colonial modernity to oppression and atrocity thus constituting a heritage of shame and death, which postcolonial societies blame upon the former colonizers. A study of how the remembering of punishment and imprisonment reflects the attempts of postcolonial cities to re-articulate an understanding of the present by correcting the past, Heritage, Memory, and Punishment examines how prisons were designed, built, partially demolished, preserved, and redeveloped across political regimes, demonstrating the ways in which the selective use of prisons as heritage, reframed through nationalism, leaves marks on urban contexts that remain long after the prisons themselves are decommissioned. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography, the built environment, and heritage with interests in memory studies and dark tourism.

Shu-Mei Huang is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University, Taiwan.

Hyun Kyung Lee is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the Academy of Korean Studiesfunded research project Beyond the Cold War, towards a community of Asia at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, UK, and the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul.

Memory Studies: Global Constellations

https://www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1411

Series editor: Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

The past in the present has returned in the early twenty-first century with a vengeance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understandings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that migrant memories; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven relation to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of emotions, embodiment, and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geography and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.

This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives has accelerated. Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces.

Titles in this series

12 Framing the Nation and Collective Identities

Political Rituals and Cultural Memory of the Twentieth Century Traumas in Croatia

Edited by Vjeran Pavlakovi and Davor Paukovi

13 London and the Politics of Memory

In the Shadow of Big Ben

Stuart Burch

14 Heritage, Memory, and Punishment

Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia

Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee

Heritage, Memory,
and Punishment

Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia

Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee

First published 2020

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2020 Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee

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ISBN: 978-1-138-62818-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-21079-7 (ebk)

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