History, Memory, and Identity in Modern Singapore
Testimonies from the Urban Margins
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11078128 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Loh Kah Seng (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-24 |
| Publication date | 2009-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Oral History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0798 • E-ISSN: 1533-8592 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ohr/ohp001 |
| OpenAlex | W2027963060 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 13 |
In 2006–2007, I interviewed elderly Singaporeans on their experiences of resettlement from an urban kampong (village) to emergency public housing after a great fire in 1961. I learned much about the lives of semiautonomous dwellers in an unauthorized settlement and the individual and social transformation following their rehousing. My informants also highlighted what the experiences meant to them and their identity in a modern city-state. This paper treats the testimonies as both source and social memory and seeks to avoid the essentialism into which many social historians, oral history practitioners, and memory scholars have fallen in their approach toward the craft. As a source of social history, when used in conjunction with other historical sources, the reminiscences are patently useful for understanding the role of public housing in transforming a marginal population into an integrated citizenry. This enables the writing of a new social history of postwar Singapore that departs from the discursive official accounts of urban kampong life and of the 1961 inferno. At the same time, the oral history also underlines powerful social and political influences on individual memory, being marked by nostalgia for the kampong and ambivalence toward the imagined character of younger Singaporeans. Statements on the rumors of government-inspired arson in the 1961 calamity, however, constitute a significant countermyth in contemporary society, revealing a more critical side to the social memory.
Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Craft · Government (linguistics) · Identity (music) · Media studies · Oral history · Political science · Politics · Population · Public history · Settlement (finance) · Social history (medicine) · Social memory · Social science · Sociology · Urban history · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Socioeconomic Development in Asia
Life Stories, Intellectual Disability, Cultural Heritage and Ethics
Oral History and Narrative
Oral History and Narrative
Multiplicity within Singularity
Fuming and fogging memories
Spatial order through the family
Stretching out the categories
From modern urban resident to sociable urban citizen
Dangerous Migrants and the Informal Mobile City of Postwar Singapore
Strict versus flexible categorizations of mixedness
Silencing the Past
Narrating our Pasts
The Notion of Place in the Construction of History, Nostalgia and Heritage in Singapore
Political Legitimacy and Housing
Domination and the Arts of Resistance
Oral History in Southeast Asia
Narratives of Gender, Class, and Modernity in Women's Memories of Mid‐Twentieth Century Britain
Purity and Danger
Do I Like Them too Much
Between Memory and History
Seeing Like a State
How We Built the Road
| Citations per year | 0.63 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2010 - 2022 (13) |
| Highly cited | No |