ABSTRACT
Engaging with scholarship on dark tourism, memory studies, and heritage studies, this chapter aims to provide a theoretical framework to discuss punishment and memories – how punishment is remembered and how remembering can imply or continue punishment of some kind. Michelle Brown’s work on the culture of punishment is helpful in drawing attention to the issue of othering inmates in interpreting prisons. Most defunct prisons around the world are subject to an ongoing process of forgetting and remembering and momentarily situated at various levels in the grades of remembering to serve particular purposes. Considering penal heritage in an Asian context, it seems that defunct prisons are treated as places of memory – prisons as war crime machines – where a personified interpretation of suffering and cruelty are exhibited while the state drives the narratives toward a particular goal of recovering the honor lost to colonialism.
