Organizer: Harvard University Asia Center

Description:

In this talk, Roosa discusses how and why he wrote the book Buried Histories. It is a book that follows the principle that in any story of an atrocity, one needs to include the stories of those who tried to prevent it from happening, those who tried to stop it once it began, those who tended to the welfare of the survivors afterward, and those who found ways to honor the dead. The book is more than a 'who did what to whom' kind of analysis of the atrocity itself. It is meant to be a funerary ceremony in textual form, where there is a concern for recognizing the dignity of the victims, recapturing the ideals for which they stood before being murdered, and conveying the tragedy of the inexcusable loss of life. This is a history book written with an attentiveness to affect, a book in which the deaths of a demonized demographic can be felt as grievable.

John Roosa is an Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup d'État in Indonesia (2006) and Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres in Indonesia 1965-1966 (2020), both from University of Wisconsin Press.

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