Issue 20: Kyoto Review of SE Asia
The Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia promotes exchange among the intellectual communities of Southeast Asia. Its primary goal is to bring news of important publications, debates, and ideas into region-wide circulation through lively and accessible writing. It also wants to encourage more sustained engagement between university-based intellectuals and those working in NGOs, journalism, and cultural production.
Each issue is organized around a theme and reviews recent work, especially books published in the region and in local languages. Recognizing that mutual inaccessibility of national languages is an important barrier to deepening knowledge of neighboring countries, we use translation to facilitate informed discussion. It is the only journal which carries articles in four languages: English, Thai, Bahasa and Japanese. Moreover,there is a column, Young Academic’s Voice, to promote works among young intellectuals who conduct research on Southeast Asia. We provide a platform for them to disseminate their work through our extensive networks across the globe.
Issue 20 focuses on “Memory Thickness: Presenting Southeast Asian Pasts” and offers fresh insights into the places and tactile traces of memory in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and diaspora. Versed in distinct vocabularies of remembrance, our contributors destabilize official discourses and political constructs through innovative analyses of diverse vehicles of memory. Their discrete vistas on Southeast Asian memory disrupt homogenizing discourses – whether theoretical or official – with innovative analyses grounded in specific vocabularies, whether linguistic or aesthetic.