アジア・アフリカ地域研究情報マガジン:メルマガ写真館
第138回 「メルマガ写真館」
Title: Touching from a Distance
... Boon Kia Meng（東南アジア地域研究専攻）
They say distance always helps to clarify our thoughts, memories and emotional attachments: to persons, places and times. Does it really?
My name is Kia Meng, a Malaysian student at ASAFAS (since 2014), conducting research on protest events that took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2011 and 2012. Protests in Malaysia became massive in that period, with close to 150,000 persons, on April 28, 2012, alone, converging on Dataran Merdeka (Independence Square), the symbolic space for national independence in 1957, in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. On that day, the police barricaded the entire perimeter of the square, ensuring that this iconic space that symbolizes freedom is ‘free’ from citizens protesting for free and fair elections (Malaysia’s social movement for electoral reform is named “Bersih”, which means ‘clean’).
I have revisited this space a number of times during my fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur in the last three years, and a certain irony and melancholy never fails to occupy my mind when I am physically in the square. This momentary, lived-space, condenses the complex articulation of questions on state power, collective memory and postcolonial subjects, that haunted me still, no matter the distance one takes, as researcher or a subject of the nation-state.
These boundaries intersect, overwhelm our neat categories, and require our patient negotiation as workers in the field.