KAH SENG LOH, STEPHEN DOBBS, and ERNEST KOH, eds. Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, xiv+205p.

Abstract

History in Southeast Asia: and Fragments KAH SENG LOH, STEPHEN DOBBS, and ERNEST KOH, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, xiv+205p.Oral History in Southeast Asia brings together a number of committed young scholars who discuss the applicability of oral history in two inseparable arenas: research and social involvement. It consists of nine chapters (four on Singapore, two on Malaysia, and one each on Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines) that are methodologically diverse and split into three parts.The first part, Oral History and Official History, engages with the themes of interaction between official narratives and oral accounts that have played a role in constructing the nation. How official narratives seized, captured, and suppressed voices to consolidate national histories is well recorded in volumes of historical discussion on Southeast Asia (see for example Reynolds 1993; Wieringa 1995). The post-independence period of the countries in the region offers fertile ground for academic debates, partly owing to post-colonial scholarship that deconstructs official narratives. The three chapters of this first part (all on Singapore's case) relate to such debates. Blackburn's chapter gives an interesting account of the results of a life-history project conducted by senior students who interviewed elderly family members. They found narratives that are not parallel to the Singapore story that they learnt from their text books. Koh's chapter describes the way the uneasy political climate of the newly created nation-state shaped the remem- brance of the Second World War. Loh's chapter, based on candid interviews, presents an appealing description of people's daily lives after British military withdrawal in the late 1960s. While both Blackburn and Koh's chapters interrogate the official history by providing accounts that differ from such history, Loh's chapter provides a moderate account that does not necessarily dispute it. With these converging perspectives, readers are made aware that people's accounts-whether they be alternative or collaborative ones-are diverse and the project of de/constructing an official narratives can find many ways to accommodate them.The second part, Memories of Violence, brings out the delicate issue of people's memories of mass violence in the context of the changing political landscapes of the nation-states in the region. All three chapters in this part operate in a similar vein in that they unpack the constitution of mass violence as an event to be remembered. Curaming and Aljunied's chapter analyzes the inter- twining coherent strands of memories of the 1968 Jabidah massacre in the context of political conflict in Mindanao (p.86). They show how the personal memories of Jibin Arula, the only key witness of the massacre, are encoded within the tragedy of his personal life and form part of a cultural myth of injustice and political conflict. Damrongviteetham's chapter, based on fieldwork, discusses the collective and individual memories of the Red Barrel (??? ???/thang daeng) incident of the early 1970s in Lamsin, Phattalung province. The incident and the annual ceremony that now marks it are a delicate issue, touching on the dynamics of Thai state-society and illuminating a discourse that touches upon human rights and state impunity. The chapter is an important contri- bution in the English language to the topic, helping scholars who do not read Thai (and are unaware of the debate among Thai scholars on the issue) to make sense of the incident. It also highlights the diverging collective memories of the community. Leong's chapter, based on eclectic sources, takes the troubled episode of the 1948 Batang Kali massacre as a departure point to lay out the political considerations of Malaysia's official narrative of the nation and the threat of communism. But despite the use of strong comparative post modernist vocabulary, it does not offer fresh engage- ment with an issue that is already well recorded. …