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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2024
This article investigates memories of the Cold War era in Thailand, through online practices on Facebook pages administered by residents of a borderland province in the Northeast that was a key front line during the conflict. The possibilities for greater access to, and dissemination of, information afforded by digital media technologies have created a new environment for the production of shared knowledge about the past. However, on these pages, instead of converging plural memories, participatory online culture and the use of the language of memory have enabled the creation of distinct and separated memory spaces. This article calls attention in particular to what is silenced and absent in what people are sharing online. It argues that the deep-seated ethnic politics of the Cold War have an afterlife in Thai society—especially in the country's ‘margins’ where the conflict was most violent—that is reflected as much by what is not said as by what is said online.
The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This article is dedicated to the memory of Dayaneetha De Silva.
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38 ‘Yuon’ is a term referring to Vietnamese people used in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. It can have a derogatory meaning depending on the context and the person who uses it.
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55 As of April 2024, these Facebook pages had 7,670 and around 9,200 members, respectively.
56 The ‘Amateur Historians’ page involves multiple contributors posting a large volume of material, and time constraints limited us to surveying five months of posts. On the ‘Returning Wind’ page, however, the fact that the page's posts have been contributed by only the page's creator means that the volume of posts is much smaller and hence it was practical for us to survey the entire contents of the page.
57 The origin of the use of the abbreviation ‘GI’ to refer to US servicemen is unclear and highly debated (see, for example, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/gi).
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105 That is, the changes in the political and geopolitical environment that affect the politics of memory. Ibid.