Hi to all History/Social Studies students,
You’re invited to a unique event where your views, experiences and feelings matter – where you are at centrestage.
We invite you to submit short notes – through email or Facebook; and they can be written or visual, or comprise photographs or video clips – on your views and experiences in learning history.
Your views matter – we are seeking thoughtful and creative responses. Selected notes will be discussed at the Students at Centrestage Seminar (see below for details).
Some things to get your thoughts going:
1. The Historian’s Way: in learning history, do you work and think like a historian?
2. The Experience: what learning activities work for you, and which activities don’t?
3. Values and Lessons: what values and lessons does history provide us?
4. Problems and Frustrations: are you frustrated by problems such as language, concepts, sources, comparison etc? How can learning history be more fun and meaningful?
5. The Future: will you take history in your next school or in university?
Students at Centrestage: A Seminar on Learning History in Singapore
Presented by the Singapore Heritage Society
9 am-1 pm, Saturday, 27 November 2010
Possibility Room, 5th Level, National Library Building
You can register for the seminar at:
http://golibrary.nlb.gov.sg/Event.aspx?E
The event is free and seating is on a FCFS basis.
Organisers:
Dr Loh Kah Seng, lkshis@gmail.com
Ms Candice Alexis Seet, candice.seet@gmail.com
Ms Junaidah Jaffar, jun.jaffar@gmail.com
Ms Lee Si Wei, witchcraftz@yahoo.com
Founded in 1986, the Singapore Heritage Society is a non-profit, non-government organisation and registered charity. The Society is dedicated to the preservation, transmission and promotion of Singapore’s history, heritage and identity.
Call for Student Presenters
Students at Centrestage: A Seminar on Learning History in Singapore
Presented by the Singapore Heritage Society
9 am-1 pm, Saturday, 27 November 2010
Possibility Room, 5th Level, National Library Building
The teaching of history has undergone tremendous change in recent years: syllabuses have been rewritten, sources have become a major form of assessment, and the content has been framed to cultivate thinking skills and citizenship education. The changes are, we know, part of the ongoing revamp of the education system in pursuit of Singapore’s desired status as a world city.
This seminar will return students to centrestage. It will acknowledge the interest, creativity and potential many students show towards the past, while highlighting the obstacles and frustrations that plague the experiences of others. It will, most importantly, listen to students’ views and feelings, not because they are necessarily true, but because they exist and ought to be empathetically heard and understood.
We invite teachers to approach their students or students to contact us directly to present their views and experiences (10-15 mins per presentation). We are looking for students doing history and social studies at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. The form of presentation is flexible. Students can present singly or in small groups (up to 3 persons), or engage in an informal dialogue with a teacher. Besides the presentations, students can also send notes of their views and experiences by email to the conveners. Teachers will not present at the seminar, although they can facilitate a dialogue session and are encouraged to attend.
Students may speak on the following subjects:
1. The Historian’s Way: in learning history, do you work and think like a historian?
2. The Experience: what learning activities work for you, and which activities don’t?
3. Values and Lessons: what values and lessons does history provide us?
4. Problems and Frustrations: are you frustrated by problems such as language, concepts, sources, comparison etc? How can learning history be more fun and meaningful?
5. The Future: will you take history in your next school or in university?
If you are interested in presenting, please send your name(s), school, email address, and a short summary of what you will talk about to us by 30 October 2010.
Conveners
Dr Loh Kah Seng, lkshis@gmail.com
Ms Candice Alexis Seet, candice.seet@gmail.com
Ms Junaidah Jaffar, jun.jaffar@gmail.com
Ms Lee Si Wei, witchcraftz@yahoo.com
Invitation to the Launch of The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History
24 July Saturday, 2-5 pm, at The Pod, Level 16, National Library Building
The Singapore Heritage Society and Ethos Books cordially invite you to a launch of an important new book on researching and writing Singapore history.
In exploring the past, researchers labour in the present: to locate the archival document which is located somewhere – behind a gate with its keeper; or to find that elusive participant who will throw light on a gap in our knowledge, and convince them to speak. The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History meditates on this relationship between past and present in a developmental city-state. It discusses how researchers seek to gain entry to archives and memories, in endeavours which crucially shape the imagination of Singapore as a nation and the identity of its people as citizens.
Due to limited seats, registration is required & can be made via http://golibrary.nlb.gov.sg and surf on to “Singapore”.
Programme
| 13:30 – 14:00 | REGISTRATION |
| 14:00 – 16:30 | COMMENTARY & DISCUSSION Moderator: Dr Loh Kah Seng |
| 14:00 | Welcome by Professor Kevin Tan, Singapore Heritage Society |
| 14:10 | Professor Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore |
| 14:30 | A/P Kwok Kian Woon, Nanyang Technological University |
| 14:50 | A/P Huang Jianli, National University of Singapore |
| 15:10 | A/P (Adj) Kwa Chong Guan, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies |
| 5:30 | Responses from other book contributors |
| 16:00 | QUESTION & ANSWER |
| 16:30 – 16:45 | LAUNCH OF THE BOOK |
| 17:00 | END OF EVENT |
2009 was a return to history. Men in White, written by three Straits Times journalists, appeared noisily in September, purporting to tell the ‘untold story’ of the PAP, including that of the ‘losers’. It was, however, one of the ‘victors’ who made an eye-catching critique of the book the following month. Yoong Siew Wah, former Director of CPIB and ISD, complained on his blog, Singapore Recalcitrant, that the authors had taken at face value a statement by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on Yoong’s alleged mishandling of an investigation into lawyer Francis Seow in 1971. The authors hastily apologised and promised to withdraw the offending point from subsequent prints of the book. For Yoong, now 82, reading Men In White was about restoring his reputation.
Younger Singaporeans have also been reading Men in White for political errors and suspicious silences, although for quite a different purpose. Before the book’s official launch, film-maker Martyn See posted an entry on his blog, responding to a preliminary news report on the book. Martyn raised two questions on the book’s credibility: that the report made no mention of Operation Coldstore, in which over a hundred leading leftists in Singapore were detained in 1963, and that the authors had not contacted two of the PAP’s main opponents in the early 1960s: Dr Lim Hock Siew and Dr Poh Soo Kai. In responding to Martyn’s queries, the authors, well, defended their work, stating that they did approach Dr Lim but he refused to be interviewed. They of course used his oral history interview at the National Archives of Singapore which many researchers are aware of, but this, I think, was not Martyn’s point. And there were many other instances of ‘history watching’. In a subsequent column in the Straits Times, one of the authors, Sonny Yap, lamented that the numerous salvoes, many in cyberspace, fired in their direction were ‘factually off the mark’.
Regardless of whether the allegations were true, I believe Sonny Yap missed the point. He should have been happy, rather than flabbergasted, that so many netizens, especially young Singaporeans, responded so acutely to a book on Singapore history. This is a country where Singaporeans born after the 1950s and 1960s are periodically reprimanded by the state for not showing interest in the country’s past. The responses to Men In White demonstrate that this is not entirely true. What is important is not whether the allegations were accurate, but that they were allegations. They revealed what histories, and whose histories, mattered to the Singaporeans born after independence. In comparison to the former ISD Director, their concerns have greater import.
I wish to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of young Singaporeans reading our country’s history today. This is an enterprise which is crucially important but also perilous, both academically and socially. Writers of history, whether it is historians or the participants, inevitably select their facts, interpret their data and make their claims. The readers likewise: how they read will be largely determined by their views and values, by the social and political context, by their age.
There is a tendency for young Singaporeans to read our past for inspiration and vilification. This is not surprising and is part of the enduring appeal of history. Inspiration because the past provides positive precedents, or heroes, of an earlier generation of Singaporeans (also young and idealistic then) struggling to make Singapore a better, fairer and more open society. Vilification because history also provides what appears to be proof of what some present day young Singaporeans want to believe – that the government is repressive, manipulative and narrowly neo-liberal. In short, we read Singapore history for Lim Chin Siong and Operation Coldstore.
This is to some extent unavoidable. I have had my own ‘honeymoon’ with Lim Chin Siong, this formidable, yet humble, political and labour activist who could bring 40,000 people to their feet with a few choice words of Hokkien, whose work was destroyed in the making of Malaysia. Lim Chin Siong has passed into legend in Singapore’s cultural imagination, which makes writing and reading about him doubly difficult.
One of the first living leftists I met in 2005 left a lasting impression. Walking up to him in Toa Payoh MRT station, he looked no different from many other ah peh in the graying estate. He firmly grasped my hand and lowered his head in greeting. I never forgot that sense of humanity he conveyed in that single moment. He was Lee Tee Tong, a labour unionist in the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union, who in 1963 stood and won in Bukit Timah (the old constituency of Lim Chin Siong), but never took his seat as he was arrested and detained without trial shortly after for 16 years. I interviewed Lee Tee Tong on a later occasion for over five hours about his life, work and politics.
Writing history for me is about getting ‘inside’ the past, achieving empathy and then crafting an independent narrative and analysis. I have researched on different facets of the Singapore left: trade unions, university political clubs and rural associations. I find a good number of possibilities for writing the subject. We can frame the left as offering the alternative ‘paths not taken’ to a different (maybe better?) Singapore. Or as pathbreakers whose work made possible the PAP’s success, visionaries whose ideas enabled the making of modern Singapore. Or as nationalists who were outmaneuvered in the geopolitics of the Cold War and then forgotten. Still, I am concerned with what the left did for Singapore and how that contribution has for so long been ignored.
The possibilities are closely related to the pitfalls. The left’s history is far richer than the themes of inspiration and vilification. The left fought for a union of Singapore and Malaya – in fact, this belief was unquestioned to a point which most young Singaporeans born into a sovereign state would have difficulty imagining. The left’s ideology was socialist, although that some radicals were less doctrinaire than others. Socialism as a doctrine entails a belief in radical change and transformation, of both nature and human nature, no less radical than the development pursued by the government since the 1960s. Will Singapore be necessarily better, fairer and more open under a socialist regime? I believe deeply in the need for greater social justice in Singapore; much of my research has been on marginalised groups in Singapore history. But I doubt the road of socialism leads to a just society any more than the highway of neo-liberalism.
These are aspects of the history of the left which we should also read and consider. I recognise the complete history is yet to be written, but at the same time, we have a moral duty to be more creative, more rigorous in the ways we explore our history. Above all, we need to ask new questions. Lee Kuan Yew gave a grudging stamp of approval to Men In White but still deemed it necessary to repeat his charge that Lim Chin Siong was a communist. I think most of us here have no interest in reviving that question, much less the answer. Each generation writes its own history but this cannot begin until we first ask new questions, questions for a new era, for a new purpose. And young Singaporeans cannot simply inherit the perspectives of the older generation.
That generation of leftists is already writing its own histories. Men In White was quickly followed by The Fajar Generation, a book by former members of the University Socialist Club in the 1950s and 1960s (a subject which I have also been working on separately). The Fajar Generation is a collective biography, a classic example of a generation writing its own history. But it also significantly blurs the line between biography and history because, as far as I know, it is the first instance where the participants have relied not just on their own memories, but also the colonial archives, to establish their views. Young Singaporeans who seek only inspiration and vilification in history will find much of both in The Fajar Generation. My suggestion is we read the book as a collective biography, and then ask ourselves, why are the former leftists now writing their histories, and what else do we want to know?
The politics of age lies between generations of Singaporeans. Another plane of the divide is on social history. In my interviews with leprosy sufferers, kampong dwellers, fire victims, and British base workers, I have come to sense something of the collective psyche of ordinary elderly Singaporeans – what they feel about the breaking events of our recent history; about politics under the PAP government; about the regimen of life and work in a ferociously developmental state.
I bring up social history because it provides new insights into the past, because it allows us to explore ‘politics’ more broadly, but also simply because we really haven’t spoken enough to our elders about the past. Our nation’s history is not simply about the struggle between the left and the Lee Kuan Yew group. One thing which struck me in my interviews with elderly people is the ambivalence in their memories of life, housing, family, work, and change in Singapore. Leprosy sufferers tell me that ‘our lives are bad but our luck is good’; they have been forcibly segregated from society and relocated from their homes several times in their lives. One victim of the 1961 Bukit Ho Swee fire wanted to find a new attap house to live in and did not want to move to an emergency HDB flat, yet recalls Lee Kuan Yew as very hiong as the prime minister in tackling the country’s challenges at the time; young Singaporeans, she insists, have had it much easier. Many elderly Singaporeans firmly support the development of Singapore and the authoritarian government which has made it possible, but are also aware of the personal and social price that they – we – have had to pay in the process. They are also the keepers of memories of events and people which can serve as a valuable counterpoint to the Singapore Story, which will help us to bridge not only generational, but also mental, divides. In listening to them, we realise that history is not painted in black and white, that there are many more ‘untold stories’ to uncover. We will find new ways to look at our history in the last 50 years which will enable us to re-imagine the future.
I am a Singaporean historian looking to speak to people who remember the British bases and their withdrawal in the early 1970s. The withdrawal was the first major crisis independent Singapore faced. The 56 bases, contributing a fifth of the country’s GDP, were its largest industry, and the pullout threatened the livelihood of one-sixth of the labour force, including an estimated 8,000 amahs.
The pullout also transformed the economy, society and landscape of Singapore in the 1970s. Most of the bases were converted to commercial use, while many base workers underwent a 3-month retraining crash course. Technical and vocational education also expanded, as new laws sought to increase labour productivity and attract foreign capital investment.
These developments resonate with us today: the retraining programmes, the mobilisation of the young, the philosophy that ‘no one owes Singapore a living’. There is also a forgotten social history to unearth: how retrenched base employees coped with the crisis and how workers adjusted to new work routines.
If you remember the British bases and rundown, or have a family member, relative or friend who does, kindly contact me to lend your voice to an important episode of our national story.
Please pass this message along to those who might be interested.
Thank you.
Loh Kah Seng (Dr)
Visiting Research Fellow
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore
Email: LKSHIS@GMAIL.COM
Conference on Historical Fragments in Southeast Asia:
At the Interfaces of Oral History, Memory and Heritage
Organised by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and Singapore Heritage Society
23-24 June 2010
The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, together with the Singapore Heritage Society, is revisiting oral history in Southeast Asia two decades since it co-organised the first conference. Historical Fragments in Southeast Asia will bring together the latest oral history and ethnographic research on the region and explore its links with two exciting fields which investigate the same content in different ways, namely, memory and heritage studies.
Historical Fragments in Southeast Asia serves as an important platform to explore the interfaces between oral history, memory and heritage and formulate new ways of approaching Southeast Asia’s fragmented pasts. Traditional oral history work in the region, which seeks to retrieve what Paul Thompson called ‘the voices of the past’ to complete or contest historical narratives, has largely been concerned with questions of objectivity and reliability. Memory studies, by contrast, has attempted to analyse the deeper politics and subjective meanings of the fragments that people remember or forget. Both oral testimonies and memories are also closely connected with the emerging and topical field of heritage in its intangible, cultural and everyday forms.
Important note: Proposals should make an attempt at this preliminary stage to consider oral history’s convergences with memory and/or heritage and not merely situate the discussion within the originating discipline or methodology. Proposals should be centered around oral history or ethnographic work. We welcome submissions from, among others, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, architects, public officials, activists, and social workers, as well as approaches from academic and advocacy perspectives.
The conference organisers are pleased to be able to offer partial financial support to participants, although they are also encouraged to seek funding from their home institutions. Selected papers from the conference will further explore the interfaces between the three fields and will be published in what we hope to be a path-breaking edited volume.
Submission of Proposal
Those interested in presenting a paper at the conference are invited to submit a proposal which includes a working title, 500-word abstract, CV, and an indication of your funding requirements by 14 December 2009 to Dr Loh Kah Seng kahseng@iseas.edu.sg.
Suggested Themes
Crisis of Memory. What and how Southeast Asians remember or forget are often narrowly channeled into narratives of loss or nostalgia. What are the influences of major historical and contemporary forces on oral history such as colonialism, developmentalism, urbanism, architectural modernism, cosmopolitanism, and globalisation? What will these developments mean for the forms of heritage that Southeast Asians can adopt? What is the impact of Internet technologies in rendering oral histories and individual memories public?
Politics of Memory. Oral history remains a deeply contested field in an era of Southeast Asian nationalism. What are the influences of the official mass media and the prerogatives of nation-building and social engineering on memory? What are the silences or social rumours of the past? What is the role and impact of the political biography and the official myth in the region? Does oral history affirm or contest dominant narratives? Does it accentuate historical agency and empower the informants?
‘Difficult’ Heritage and Identity. The nation-state remains the primary organising actor in Southeast Asia. Yet, there are important forms of memory, heritage and identity which exist outside or even in direct opposition to the national paradigm, along the divides of locality, gender, ethnicity, class, age, among others. How can communities and oral historians attempt to recover these interstitial, everyday or local forms of heritage and memories that exist ‘between the cracks’ or ‘out of sight’ of the dominant paradigm? How should we negotiate between national, transnational, community, and local identities?
Trauma and Reconstruction. Since World War Two and the subsequent decolonisation which has transformed Southeast Asia, political conflict, economic crisis, natural disasters, epidemics, and social upheaval have been marked features of everyday life in the region. How have memory and heritage been affected by these developments and does oral history help redress the personal and social traumas experienced in the process?
Contact Details
Dr Loh Kah Seng
kahseng@iseas.edu.sg
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
ISBN: 9789833782765
Author: Loh Kah Seng
Publisher: SIRD
Year: 2009
No of Pages: 189
Product ID: 434
Publisher
http://www.gerakbudaya.com/products-pag
Blog
http://unmakingtheasylum.wordpress.c
Making and Unmaking the Asylum is a book which tells of two entangled stories – one of the misapplication of modern medicine – and the other of the resilience and resourcefulness of those who suffered from the disease and its terrible consequences.
It is also a book which demands that we examine the nature and consequences of our unceasing pursuit of modernity. It calls to attention the discomforting shape of our beliefs in modern science, disease and contagion.
Date: 10/11/2008
Time: 08:30 - 18:00
Venue: ARI Seminar Room
469A Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road
National University of Singapore @ BTC
Organisers:
Dr LIEW Kai Khiun
LOH Kah Seng
http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/events_catego
Please download the programme here:
http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/showfile.a
Description:
Jointly organised by the Singapore Heritage Society and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
The close relationship between the makers and gatekeepers of history is a defining landmark which researchers delving into the Singapore past will invariably encounter. It is also an association which has not been adequately explored. This conference examines the individual, social and political aspects of encountering the makers and keepers of the island’s history. The presenters will speak on their personal forays into key moments of this past, and the accompanying tribulations and tensions, and joys and frustrations. On a broader canvas, the conference takes an earnest, self-reflective look at the basic questions of what history means for the quintessentially forward-looking and rationally-managed city-state and the relationship between history, society and power.
The makers of Singapore history are an obvious subject of inquiry: specifically, how they viewed their world, acted upon it and their underlying motivations. The research is, in practice, a pursuit of sources, which includes both archival records and personal memories. Researchers know the sources they need and attempt to obtain them. What is less clear, however, is the role of the makers in determining this crucial access to the archives or oral history. In holding the keys to the past, the makers are then able to preside over two new makings of history: that of the present and of the future.
The terms ‘makers’ and ‘keepers’ are defined loosely here; this is a deliberate choice. Both apply to the political elites who dominate the usual historical narratives. They are not only movers of history but also powerful managers of the present and future, whose influence over access to the local archives shapes what is socially remembered as the nation’s history. As victors of history, they stand in marked contrast to the defeated, who may either choose to remember or to be silent. Ordinary Singaporeans who lived through the recent past are also involved in making, and keeping, history. Like the elites, they can determine what and how much of their personal memory to reveal to an interviewer. When personal experiences encroach upon what is considered politically acceptable in contemporary Singapore and are withheld, ordinary people in effect become gatekeepers of their own pasts. Finally, no less involved in making and keeping the past are those who speak on behalf of the abovementioned groups. This includes the researchers themselves and reveals the multiple individual and social roles they occupy.
Encounters with the makers and gatekeepers become particularly acute at the frontiers of knowledge, where academic, and social and political imperatives may coincide. The frontiers of Singapore history are also social and political boundaries. They are the margins of The Singapore Story, the official narrative of the island’s history which has been consciously scripted, and rescripted, in pragmatic pursuit of national goals. But the past is also becoming of deep interest to a new, younger generation of researchers who approach it with fresh visions and methods. They are attempting to outflank the official restrictions on access to local archives by venturing into the ‘side gates’ of history – the foreign archives. They are also seeking to gain deeper access to individual and social memory by engaging both ordinary and elite makers who once stood at the margins of society, economy and politics and have for a long time been forgotten. This conference highlights how researchers are striving to negotiate between the imperatives of the past and present, and the complex, dynamic relationship between history, society and power in modern Singapore.
PANELS
Panel 1: Front Gates: Local Archives
Panel 2: Side Gates: Alternative Archives
Panel 3: The Prime Movers
Panel 4: Ordinary People and Subalterns
Panel 5: History, Society and Power in Singapore
I picked up the Echo one night and saw a headline in which Benitez compared me to Roberto Ayala, the great Argentine defender he'd managed at Valencia.
I knew I wasn't in Ayala's class. More to the point, I knew Benitez didn't think I was as good as Ayala. But to know he'd said it certainly boosted my confidence.
Benitez repeated the trick in a press conference before a league game with Chelsea, but this time there was a sting in the tail.
"I've just told the media you're a better player than John Terry," Rafa told me. Then he started laughing as he madea tell-tale sign, putting his hand to his nose and pulling it out to imitate Pinocchio.
Before our Champions League semi-final with Chelsea I got him back when I was handed the press conference duties. "What did they ask you?" Rafa quizzed me. "I told them you're a better manager than Mourinho," I said, and then repeated his Pinocchio mime.
From Jamie Carragher's autobiography.
Hi, how can anyone (especially in the social sciences & humanities) claim objectivity in this day and age? ;)
FWIW I am a history PhD and my thesis was based on an event which occurred in a place I used to grow up in into my teens. Doing the research made me think deeply about issues of growing up in the area, particularly the housing. And in studying the population in the area, I frequently referred to my knowledge of my family and relatives living in the locality. In short, my final work is strongly biographical and it helped me me attain historical empathy and imagination.
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