On 15 February 1946, the first anniversary after the return of British forces of the Fall of Singapore, its attempted commemoration by a crowd of 250 demonstrators in Bras Basah Road in the heart of today's civic centre in Singapore was met by police fire and the death of two demonstrators. Today, the 15 of February is commemorated in grand style every year in Singapore as ‘Total Defence Day’ by a Singapore state bent on educating its young to remember the war as ‘a catalyst in building a nation out of the young and unestablished community of diverse immigrants’ (p. 304). In the neighbouring state of Malaysia, a different war is remembered. Hari Pahlawan or Warriors Day is celebrated on 31 July every year, ‘to commemorate the dead in the battle against Communist terrorists and also the Malays who have given their lives for the country in fighting for independence since 1511’ (p. 234).

War memory lends itself par excellence to the project of collective and national myth-making, thanks to its intricate link to the individual and group experience of trauma. Politics, or mourning, have thus been the two paradigmatic approaches taken to its commemoration, and the extensive literature on the subject has tended to focus on either the one or the other. In this painstakingly researched and richly detailed book by historians Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack on war memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore, the theme of politics clearly dominates. The book is an ambitious attempt to write the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore in terms of the multiple — but clearly delineated as distinct and disparate — war memory of individuals, communities, and state in these two countries.

In charting the politics of memory over a span of almost seven decades of cultural production and sites of memory related to the war in these two umbilically linked new states whose birth emerges from the Japanese Occupation and its aftermath, the authors focus on the very different trajectories of memory production and suppression which the two nation–states have generated, traceable, they argue, to the kind of state each has become. Two multiethnic polities with contesting visions of political community have shaped two contrasting models of war commemoration.

A Malay-dominated state in Malaysia exercises a highly selective memory in which official war memory has been limited to the war heroism of the Malay Regiment, on whose shoulders rests ultimately the burden of defending ketuanan Melayu or Malay primacy, in Malaysia's multiethnic polity. In this narrative however, the war centring on the Fall of Singapore and the Japanese Occupation is only one of a series of martial memories which reaches back to 1511 and the much more momentous Fall of Malacca, when Malay sovereignty was lost, and culminates in the 1957 end of the Emergency, with which Malay sovereignty was restored. It is this day, 31 July, which is commemorated every year. In elevating this longue durée ‘Malay memory’ to the historical master narrative of the nation, the Malay-dominated state, albeit completely ignoring the memories of all the other communities (Indian, Chinese, Eurasian) and refusing to take them into account in the construction of official history and memory, allows them to tend to their own memories in their own ethnic spaces, resulting in what the authors call ‘a model of plural commemoration’ (p. 335). The extensive ‘deathscapes’ (p. 8) in which Malaysian Chinese commemorate their war dead, is testimony to this.

Singapore, on the other hand, as a state based on ‘multiculturalism’, adopted an ‘integrationist’ (p. 333) and ‘inclusive’ (p. 330) approach to war memory and constructed ‘a unified, and unifying, national story’ of how the nation was formed through the experience of shared wartime suffering (p. 9), in which an attempt has been made to incorporate the memories of all ethnic communities. This all-embracing memory project, in adopting the war as a key moment in the scripting of the national past, progressively upgraded the significance of 15 February, around which a host of commemorative sites and activities were developed, deemed suitable for popular and in particular student, but also international war veteran tourist consumption. The well-oiled and well-funded state-sponsored war memory production machinery also allowed room for plurality, in this case, as the authors note, for ‘community memory activists, consultancies, and academics’ (p. 333) to play a ‘largely hidden role’ in Singapore's state-mandated war memory project (p. 332), a role which is left out of the account in this book.

Both models, the ‘highly selective’ as well as the ‘integrationist’, suffer from one startling defect — the monuments built to enshrine the putative national memory leave the public cold. While scrupulously noting this fact, as it does so much else, the authors' attempt to address this question, and with it a key issue in memory studies — the limits to representation in the politics of memory — remains less than satisfactory. The stated methodological thrust was to ‘progress from what happened to individuals, through what communities sought to commemorate, to how states have attempted to utilise and reshape memories’ (p. 11). The deeply complex and ambiguous linkages between these various layers of memory, beginning with the individual, is indeed of central methodological and conceptual concern, but the authors' somewhat schematic and reductionist organisation of memory into the binary trope of hero or victim across hierarchically conceived entities (individual, community, state) worked best for illuminating explicit memory projects of the state, less well for the troubled realms of individual and shared memory, where much remains unresolved and unspoken.

The problem is methodological as well as conceptual. Notwithstanding the attention paid to the individual and the community, the analysis here has been less about memory as a domain of struggle over meaning, than about the culling of biographical information for the narration of historical facts. Race frames the analysis of collective memory, although ideology was clearly critical in determining group experience and memory. War memory frames the account of the national narrative, although there may be other, perhaps more compelling, foundational myths of nationhood being fashioned by both states. In the end, we learn much about how the states of Malaysia and Singapore have shaped war memory, much less about how war memory has shaped the making of these two states.

The book remains the first to provide a comprehensive and fascinating account of the history of war memory in the modern nation–states of Malaysia and Singapore, and an illuminating study of the complex contestations and configurations of the politics of memory to which war lends itself.