Keynote Speakers – ASAH Conference 2026
Keynote 1
Submerged Histories: Reflections on New Ways of Remembering Colonial Histories in Indonesia Today
Katharine McGregor (University of Melbourne)
Across settler colonies and countries representing former colonial powers there has been a renewed push since the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter protests to re-examine colonial history and to more critically engage with colonial continuities. This has led to intensified efforts to decolonise museums, repatriate colonial heritage and projects to embrace long marginalised historical voices. But how or to what extent have such movements touched formerly colonised countries and how important is a re-examination of colonial histories in these contexts. Taking Indonesia as a case study this paper surveys how and why a range of different Indonesians have over the last decade in particular begun to engage with colonial history and colonial continuities. The paper also interrogates the extent to which colonial history or more recent histories are at the forefront of historical trauma in Indonesia and how and why a range of different Indonesian memory activists including artists, writers, journalists, photographers and community history activists engage in new ways with submerged histories. It asks what drives these efforts and how they are connected to broader a project of re-imagining a more plural and inclusive Indonesia.
Katharine McGregor is Professor of Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Kate has researched many topics related to Indonesian history and struggles with memory and violence from the colonial period through to the present. Her most recent books include the co-edited collection Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality (2025) and the sole authored book Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (Critical Human Rights Series, University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) and outcome of her ARC Future Fellowship, which won the 2024 NSW Premier’s General History Prize. Kate is currently working with Ana Éclair on the ARC DP funded research project Submerged Histories: Collaborative Memory Activism Indonesia and the Netherlands. She is also a research co- lead for the University of Melbourne’s History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective. Kate is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Keynote 2
Project Korea: Zainichi’s Politics of Decolonization in Postwar Japan
Sayaka Chatani (National University of Singapore)
How did Korean minorities pursue decolonization while remaining on their former colonizer’s soil after August 1945? Drawing on hundreds of oral histories and extensive archival research, this talk examines the worldview and political strategies of leftist Koreans in postwar Japan. In occupation-era Japan, three forces converged: the grassroots energy of Korean residents, the systematic hostility of American and Japanese authorities, and the ideological magnetism of North Korea. Together, these forces propelled a majority of zainichi Koreans to construct a state-like organization and form a nation-like community within Japan’s borders. This leftist Korean movement became the central force shaping zainichi society’s internal dynamics while simultaneously (and paradoxically) reinforcing Japanese conservative hegemony. The decolonization project undertaken by these Koreans generated profound implications across multiple domains: their formation of diaspora-ness, the politicization of everyday life, the transformation of family and gender relations, their distinctive mental geographies, and the course of Japanese leftist activism and one-party dominance. By centering these Korean experiences, we unlock critical new frameworks to examine postwar Japan, East Asia, and beyond.
Sayaka Chatani (Ph.D. in International and Global History from Columbia University, 2014) is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. She is a multilingual social historian of the Japanese Empire and its aftermath, focusing on ideological mobilization, emotions, and community dynamics. Her first book, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018; recipient of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award 2019), compares the experiences and mindsets of young men under imperial mobilization in the countryside of northern Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Okinawa. Her second book, A Nation Within: North Korean Zainichi in Postimperial Japan (Stanford University Press), delves into the internal dynamics of the pro-North Korean zainichi community and proposes a new perspective to conceptualize postwar Japan as “postimperial” Japan.