The Battle of Thakhek, 21 March 1946: Traces of a colonial massacre on the Lao–Thai border

Abstract

This article explores the life of an event—a massacre during the First Indochina War on 21 March 1946 in Thakhek, Laos—in the border town of Nakhon Phanom in northeastern Thailand, to where most of the survivors fled. Ignored by Thai authorities and not memorialized in social practices, this event nevertheless continues to have significant impacts on local communities. This article draws on two key concepts: Paul Ricoeur’s “mnemonic act” and Avery Gordon’s notion of “haunting.” Ricoeur’s “small miracle” of memory and Gordon’s haunting as a way of awakening consciousness to past violence help to elucidate the meanings of events for the present, namely, the traces that they leave. Following Valentina Napolitano’s definition of “trace,” this article shows how the memory of the event of 21 March 1946 has become anchored in different sites in Nakhon Phanom and how the event has acquired different meanings, its life prolonged through divergent processes of (re)interpretation and narrativization in each of these sites.