Lee, H.K., Huang, SM. (2025). Uses and Reuses of Difficult Built Heritage in East Asia's Postcolonial Context. In: Saloul, I., Baillie, B. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61493-5_346-1
This entry examines the uses and reuses of difficult built heritage in East Asia’s postcolonial context. It positions difficult heritage as a lens through which East Asia has come to be what it is in the postcolonial era and reflects the complex narratives not only as remnants of fraught histories but also as focal points for contemporary identity formation and national narratives. This pays particular attention to entangled memories of East Asia’s difficult heritage sites associated with the Second World War and the multiple conflicts in between empires from the eighteenth century onward. On this scope, this provides an overview of East Asia’s postcolonial and post-authoritarian responses to difficult heritage according to the changes of domestic and international political climate. First, this shows the shift from a legacy of deliberate forgetting to strategic uses of heritage as political tools for nation-building. Second, by shedding light upon heritage diplomacy, this covers East Asia’s transnational difficult heritage-making movements that increasingly emerged in the mid-2010s. Third, this introduces a novel phenomenon in East Asia’s small cities concerning the commodification of difficult heritage for city branding. Fourth, this discusses how East Asia’s uncomfortable past was selectively/strategically adapted into contemporary society for consumption with a sense of “authenticity,” and how difficult heritage is reinterpreted to serve the contemporary use in memory politics. Finally, the entry envisions the formation of a transnational difficult heritage network that can help transform “my place of pain and shame” to “our place of sympathy and compassion,” embracing East Asia’s multilayered difficult pasts.