Abstract
Transmission of family memories from generation to generation through oral history can provide unique insights into events in a nation’s history that have been directly experienced by the older members of the family. These family narratives may be at variance to those usually propagated by the organs of the state through history taught in the schools and stories told in the state-controlled media. Ruth Finnegan has described how family narratives are myths and traditions that become the shared stories meant to bind the family together, not bind together the nation, which is what the state is concerned with.1 In a society such as Singapore, where the state keeps a tight rein on interpretations of the past, memories as they are passed down from the older generations of the family to the younger could even be constructions of oppositional or alternative narratives to those given by the state because their purpose is different from the official histories of the state-run education system.2
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Notes
Ruth Finnegan, “Family Myths, Memories and Interviewing,” in The Oral History Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 177–83.
Kevin Blackburn, “History from Above: The Use of Oral History in Shaping Collective Memory in Singapore,” in Oral History and Public Memory, ed. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (New York: Temple University Press, 2008), pp. 31–46.
Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson, “Introduction,” in Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories, ed. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 2–7.
Kevin Blackburn, “Ex-Political Detainee Forum at Singapore in 2006,” Oral History Association of Australia Journal 29 (2007): 56–59.
See for example Sonny Yap, Richard Lim, and Leong Weng Kam, Men in White: The Untold Story of Singapore’s Ruling Political Party (Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, 2009).
Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998).
See Michael D. Barr and Zlatko Skrbis, Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation-Building Project (Copenhagen: NIAS, 2008), pp. 18–38.
See K. J. Ratnam, Communalism and the Political Process in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965), pp. 208–13.
Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli, The Scripting of A National History: Singapore and Its Pasts (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008).
Shirlena Huang and Brenda Yeoh, “Under One Roof: Housing, Family Ties and Domestic Space,” in The Ties That Bind: In Search of the Modern Singapore Family, AWARE edition (Singapore: AWARE, 1996), p. 57.
Stella R. Quah, Family in Singapore, 2nd edition (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998), p. 209.
Goh Chor Boon and Saravanan Gopinathan, “History Education and the Construction of National Identity in Singapore, 1945–2000,” in History Education and National Identity in East Asia, ed. Edward Vickers and Alsia Jones (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 203–26.
Selvaraj Velayutham, Responding to Globalization: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of South East Asian Studies, 2007), pp. 131–32.
I have outlined the rationale for a similar project in Kevin Blackburn, “Reminiscence and War Trauma: Recalling the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, 1942–1945,” Oral History 33.2 (Autumn 2005): 91–98. See also Blackburn, “Oral History as a Product of Malleable and Shifting Memories in Singapore,” in The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History, ed. Loh Kah Seng and Liew Kai Khiun (Singapore: Ethos, 2010), pp. 205–31.
Paul Thompson, “Family Myth, Models, and Denials in the Shaping of Individual Life Paths,” in Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories, ed. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 27.
For a definition of the official narrative of Singapore’s history, see Loh Kah Seng, “Within The Singapore Story: The Use and Narrative of History in Singapore,” Crossroads 12.2 (1998): 7.
Shail Mayaram, “Speech, Silence and the Making of Partition Violence in Mewat,” in Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 126–63.
Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, and Memory: Chauri-Chaura 1922–1992 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006).
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First, The Singapore Story: 1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000), pp. 120–21, 206–7.
Gyanendra Pandey, “In Defence of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,” Representations 37, Special Issue on Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter 1992): 28–29; and see Gyanendra Pandey, “Voices from the Edge: The Struggle to Write Subaltern Histories,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 281–99.
Mickey Chiang, Fighting Fit: The Singapore Armed Forces (Singapore: Times, 1990).
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© 2013 Kah Seng Loh, Stephen Dobbs, and Ernest Koh
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Blackburn, K. (2013). Family Memories as Alternative Narratives to the State’s Construction of Singapore’s National History. In: Loh, K.S., Dobbs, S., Koh, E. (eds) Oral History in Southeast Asia. PALGRAVE Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311672_2
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