Oral History in Southeast Asia Memories and Fragments

by Loh, Kah Seng; Dobbs, Stephen; Koh, Ernest

• ISBN13: 9781137311665
• ISBN10: 1137311665
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-07-18
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Elderly Southeast Asians experienced great changes in their lives – of war and violence, of the imposition of the nation-state, of economic development – and remember them in different ways. Their oral histories may bear the influence of state-sanctioned narratives, attempt to speak truth to power or reconcile individual and official memories. By taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments considers the relationship of these fragments of memory to dominant accounts; it unravels the complex ways through which people remember and make sense of their pasts.

Author Biography

Kah Seng Loh is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. He is author of The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (co-authored 2012).

Stephen Dobbs is Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He is author of The Singapore River: A Social History 1819-2002 (2002).

Ernest Koh is Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is author of Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore (2010) and Diaspora At War: The Chinese of Malaya between Empire and Nation 1937-1945 (forthcoming in 2013).

Table of Contents

1. Oral History and Fragments in Southeast Asia; Loh Kah Seng, Ernest Koh and Alistair Thomson
PART I: ORAL HISTORY AND OFFICIAL HISTORY 
2. Family Memories as Alternative Narratives to the State's Construction of Singapore's National History; Kevin Blackburn
3. 'You have picked a wrong candidate:' Latent Fragments and Reasonable Narratives of the British Military Withdrawal from Singapore; Loh Kah Seng
4. Remembrance, Nation, and the Second World War in Singapore: The Chinese Diaspora and their Wars; Ernest Koh
PART II: MEMORIES OF VIOLENCE
5. On the Fluidity and Stability of Personal Memory: Jibin Arula and the Jabidah Massacre in the Philippines; Rommel A. Curaming and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied
6. Narratives of the 'Red Barrel' Incident: Collective and Individual Memories in Lamsin, Southern Thailand; Jularat Damrongviteetham
7. Memory, Trauma and Nation: History and Memory Contestation in Malaysia; Leong Kar Yen
PART III: ORAL TRADITION AND HERITAGE
8. The Anthropologist as Heroine: Contemporary Interpretations of Memory and Heritage in an Indonesian Valley; Emilie Wellfelt
9. Oral History, Heritage Conservation and the Leprosy Settlement: The Sungai Buloh Community in Malaysia; Chou Wen Loong and Ho Sok Fong
10. Memory, Heritage and the Singapore River: 'It is like a dead snake'; Stephen Dobbs