Whose Memory Becomes History

Sunyoung Oh

• Publisher: SCAP PRESS
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9791199830028
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

Whose Memory Becomes History? explores which memories enter official history and which experiences of suffering and voices are pushed into silence, through a series of conversations between Sunyoung Oh and Indonesian historian and curator Andi Achdian. Addressing colonialism and state violence, political community, citizenship, and public memory, the book shows that history is not simply a record of the past but the outcome of continuing social choices and struggles over remembrance and forgetting. Through the sculptures of Dolorosa Sinaga, it also gives visible form to suffering, resistance, and solidarity that cannot be fully expressed in words, expanding the meaning of citizenship beyond legal status to include the right to speak, to be remembered, to have one's suffering acknowledged, and to demand accountability. Although grounded in Indonesia's historical experience, the questions raised by the book extend to Korea and other societies: Whose testimony do we choose to hear, whose suffering do we continue to overlook, and what kinds of history can research, documentation, museums, and art create in resistance to forgetting?

Table of contents

• Whose Memory Becomes History
• Prologue—A Question Resumed
• Introduction—When Does Democracy Remain Unfinished?
• 1. A Shared Political World and the People’s Renaissance
• 2. Writing History from Below and the Archive
• 3. Independence and Unfinished Citizenship
• 4. Regimes of Pain and the Politics of Memory
• Conclusion—Becoming Citizens Who Can Remember
• Bibliography
• Image Captions