Singapore. War memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore. By Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 458. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

War memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore By KEVIN BLACKBURN and KARL HACK Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 458. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi:10.1017/S002246341300074X On 15 February 1946, the first anniversary after the return of British forces of the Fall of Singapore, its attempted commemoration by a crowd of 250 demonstrators in Bras Basah Road in the heart of today's civic centre in Singapore was met by police fire and the death of two demonstrators. Today, the 15 of February is commemorated in grand style every year in Singapore as 'Total Defence Day' by a Singapore state bent on educating its young to remember the war as 'a catalyst in building a nation out of the young and unestablished community of diverse immigrants' (p. 304). In the neighbouring state of Malaysia, a different war is remembered. Hari Pahlawan or Warriors Day is celebrated on 31 July every year, 'to commemorate the dead in the battle against Communist terrorists and also the Malays who have given their lives for the country in fighting for independence since 1511' (p. 234). War memory lends itself par excellence to the project of collective and national myth-making, thanks to its intricate link to the individual and group experience of trauma. Politics, or mourning, have thus been the two paradigmatic approaches taken to its commemoration, and the extensive literature on the subject has tended to focus on either the one or the other. In this painstakingly researched and richly detailed book by historians Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack on war memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore, the theme of politics clearly dominates. The book is an ambitious attempt to write the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore in terms of the multiple--but clearly delineated as distinct and disparate --war memory of individuals, communities, and state in these two countries. In charting the politics of memory over a span of almost seven decades of cultural production and sites of memory related to the war in these two umbilically linked new states whose birth emerges from the Japanese Occupation and its aftermath, the authors focus on the very different trajectories of memory production and suppression which the two nation-states have generated, traceable, they argue, to the kind of state each has become. Two multiethnic polities with contesting visions of political community have shaped two contrasting models of war commemoration. A Malay-dominated state in Malaysia exercises a highly selective memory in which official war memory has been limited to the war heroism of the Malay Regiment, on whose shoulders rests ultimately the burden of defending ketuanan Melayu or Malay primacy, in Malaysia's multiethnic polity. In this narrative however, the war centring on the Fall of Singapore and the Japanese Occupation is only one of a series of martial memories which reaches back to 1511 and the much more momentous Fall of Malacca, when Malay sovereignty was lost, and culminates in the 1957 end of the Emergency, with which Malay sovereignty was restored. It is this day, 31 July, which is commemorated every year. In elevating this longue duree 'Malay memory' to the historical master narrative of the nation, the Malay-dominated state, albeit completely ignoring the memories of all the other communities (Indian, Chinese, Eurasian) and refusing to take them into account in the construction of official history and memory, allows them to tend to their own memories in their own ethnic spaces, resulting in what the authors call 'a model of plural commemoration' (p. …