Open lecture with Professor Yew-Foong Hui, Hong Kong Shue Yan University

In defending Bukit Brown Cemetery in Singapore, which was subject to partial clearing to make way for an eight-lane highway, civil society actors argued that the cemetery was a deathscape embedded in a heritage ecology involving culture and nature. Valorised as a cultural heritage space in terms of its tangible forms (graves) and intangible forms (memorialisation rituals), as well as an idyllic nature area serving environmental interests, activists sought both heritage justice and environmental justice from the state. Drawing together these forms of heritage and the environment are various memorialisation rituals performed in the cemetery during different seasons, including Qing Ming, Hungry Ghost (Zhongyuan) Festival, and Winter Clothing Festival. These rituals commemorating the dead imbibe an ethics of care and engage the living, the dead, and the environment in a trans-worldly economy, whereby the dead continue to exercise agency over the living through uncanny transcripts. By unravelling the discursive acts of activists and ritual visitors associated with Bukit Brown Cemetery, this lecture will explicate the complex and uneasy intertwining of interests linked to deathscapes and heritage.

Bio: Yew-Foong HUI is an anthropologist and Professor at Hong Kong Shue Yan University. In 2008-2009 and 2011-2015, he led the heritage documentation of two major Chinese cemeteries in Singapore. He has conducted field research among Chinese communities in different parts of Southeast Asia and East Asia, and his research interests include Chinese diasporic heritage, digital heritage, and cemetery studies, among others. He is the author of Strangers at Home: History and Subjectivity among the Chinese of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, and co-editor of Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-Making in Asia.