Memory-Making ‘from Below’: Rescaling Remembrance at the Kranji War Memorial and Cemetery, Singapore

Abstract

Current literature on Commonwealth war cemeteries has tended to analyze these spaces of memory either as loci of ‘personal’ mourning or as symbolic manifestations of ‘imperial’ identities. However, as the number of those directly related to the war dwindles, these memorials as sites of bereavement have become less relevant to a new generation. As former colonies break away from the former British empire, these sites as expressions of a landscape that is ‘for ever England’ may also be losing currency. In this paper we focus upon Kranji War Memorial and Cemetery, a site maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to honour mainly those sacrificed in Singapore during the Second World War. Specifically, we highlight how Singaporeans have, in recent times, reappropriated the meanings of the site ‘from below’—through the contemporization and extraction of counternarratives—in an attempt to keep the resonance of the site for them. This, we argue, has led to the rescaling of remembrance from the level of the ‘personal’ or ‘imperial’ (which initially kept locals away) to one that is ‘national’ or ‘global’ (thus, salient to locals as well). In doing so we suggest how the readings of the site are bound to scales of commemoration, and how mnemonic practices at such memoryscapes may be contested within and across scales.