This is a volume of five essays from the batch of honours-year theses written under the supervision of the Department of History, National University of Singapore. The topics in the volume cover the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries, and encompass such sub-fields as religion, urban landscape, history and memory, and colonial studies.
The first paper, authored by Chiew Jing Wen, explores the co-relation between the location of Datuk Gong deities, their origins and nature of worship by devotees. In the process, the author locates this local religious practice in the context of the high modernist nation-building projects and the resulting demographic and physical changes in the landscape of Singapore, as well as the changing cultural nature of the demands and premises of Datuk Gong worship up to the present.
The second paper, authored by Victor Zhuang Kuan Song, examines the place of disability in the national narrative of modern Singapore. Zhuang argues that the narrative of this sub-group in Singapore has been progressively degenerative, and advocates for the need to reframe the national narrative by including the sub-narrative of the disabled, and the social discourse between the needs of the disabled and the perception of this group by the various aspects of Singaporean society, so as to normalise the narrative of this sub-group.
The third paper, authored by Eisen Teo, looks at how nationalism and nation-building in Malaysia, as represented by the exhibits at the Proclamation of Independence Memorial in Malacca, serve as an effective manifestation of the ethnic discourse of Malaysian politics and nationalist history as constructed and articulated by the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the ruling party of Malaysia. More importantly, Teo suggests that the museum, and museums in general, can have a degree of success in invoking the emotive, experiential aspects of the narrating of collective memories, and in the process broaching generations that had experienced these events and processes first-hand, and subsequent ones that receive these memories as social inheritances.
The fourth paper, by Christina Wu, examines the impact that the Maria Hetogh incident had on both the domestic Malay population, as well as at such places as the Netherlands and the UK. Although involving an already intensely studied topic, Wu argues that it is possible to deconstruct the implications and nuances that gendered and ethnic terms used in the debates that ensued during the time of the incident, and to chart the oscillation between notions of masculinity, femininity, personal morality and racial supremacy and superiority over a relatively short period of time, from both the Malay and Western (i.e. Dutch) perspectives.
The last paper, by Lim Tse Siang, examines the extent to which the Malayan railway system, built by the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, may be regarded as a tool of imperialism in the final phase of British colonialism on the Malay Peninsula. He argues that this tool not only allowed the British to integrate the Malayan economy with the port-city of Singapore, but also disseminated British political rule and reintegrated Malay political structures with the colonial administration in Singapore. In the process, the hitherto bifurcated nature of political structure in Malaya became increasingly integrated into a singular colonial structure, attained at the expense of indigenous political structures.
This volume is a showcase of the emerging scholarly interests on both Singapore and Malaysian history at the National University of Singapore. Utilising approaches that reflect the current state of the historical field, including gender studies, urban history, geo-political spatial discourse and marginality or complexity studies, the resulting papers demonstrate that the use of newer, more innovative methodologies of research, coupled with the integration of other related fields of study, including folklore studies and museum studies, can yield some innovative and exciting results even in topics that are already well studied or researched.
Herein, as a critical departure of sorts, this volume will no doubt augment current trends in Singapore studies, including alternative histories, the exploration of newer sources of information for historical research in Singapore, and the globalisation of the history of Singapore (see The makers and keepers of Singapore history, ed. Loh Kah Seng and Liew Kai Khiun [Singapore: Ethos Books and Singapore Heritage Society, 2010]; Kwa Chong Guan, Derek Heng and Tan Tai Yong, Singapore, A 700-year history: From early emporium to world city [Singapore: National Archives of Singapore, 2009]). This volume demonstrates, despite its brevity, that at least in the area of Singapore historiography, there appears to not be as much a need to revoke the established meta-narratives of the modern nation-states, and instead to add onto their complexity. In other words, key events and processes may be imbued with facets of perspective that complement, contradict, but overall, enrich our understanding of both Singapore and Malaysia's past.
Bearing that in mind, it has to be mentioned that the present volume is reflective of a level of scholarship that is rudimentary. Nonetheless, the essays do reflect the current interests of young emerging scholars in Singapore, and one waits with anticipation as their scholarly interests and research abilities mature.
Second, it is clear that in terms of topics this volume is heavily tilted towards the history of Singapore. Although Teo and Lim's papers are centred on Malaysia, they deal with issues at the macro-level, and the result is that the nuance that can emerge from more micro-level studies, evident in the other three papers, is absent. However, given that this volume is the first in what may be a series supported by the Mubin Sheppard Memorial Fund (administered by the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society), it is likely that one can therefore anticipate a future volume with which this imbalance may be addressed, and that the methodologies, approaches and research interests of students of Malaysia would further enrich the historical knowledge of the Malay Peninsula.
