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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Review: Singapore, A Biography

Mark Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow. Singapore: A Biography. Singapore: National Museum of Singapore, 2009.

Ten years ago, the memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister, were published in two volumes entitled The Singapore Story and From Third World to First. Much has been made of the audacious ‘The’ of the first volume — not a but the only Singapore Story, synonymous with Lee’s own. Yet it would be little exaggeration to say that Singapore, for the past fifty years at least, has really had no other.

But now, Singapore has a new story.

Posted on Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 4:32 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Yuri Dojc's Last Folio: An Exhibition

Books are beautiful, even in death and deathly times. So says a new photo exhibition of dying books, immortalized in print and on display in Cambridge University's Gonville & Caius Library.

Entitled Last Folio, the exhibition presents Yuri Dojc's photographs from an old Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, a building frozen in time since one fateful day in 1943 in which every teacher and child in the school was spirited away to the concentration camps. Their abrupt departure left the halls and classrooms desolate; the books, their pages fluttering to stillness, decayed wordlessly until their discovery half a century later.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 11:47 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Saturday, October 17, 2009

A brief introduction to the Sejarah Melayu

The Sejarah Melayu, or "The Malay Annals" as it became known in colonial scholarship, is regarded as one of the great classics of Malay literature, and chronicles the genealogies of rulers and kings in the Malay Archipelago, over a period of about six centuries. Its title bears the indelible mark of colonial intervention: the original title of the work was actually Sululat-us-Salatin, or roughly, "The Origins of Kings", but race-minded colonial philologists preferred to see it as a classic history of "The Malays", where arguably none such racial category could have been said to exist so certainly at the time. By introducing it into the colonial curriculum in these terms, they helped to solidify that particular category, with profound modern consequences. Today, Malaysian schoolchildren all know it as the Sejarah Melayu -- the elision is politically convenient.

I wanted to excerpt one of the most famous sections of the Sejarah -- as a little pre-Hobbesian social contract scenario, but more generally, as a small introduction to Malay court history (for that is what the Sululat-us-Salatin was: a royal history, probably commissioned specifically to impart legitimacy to the Malay rulers). It's an exchange between Sri Tri Buana, a Srivijayan prince of supposedly supernatural origin who is supposed to represent the Malay Rulers, and Demang Lebar Daun, who is a prince of Palembang, but who in the text is supposed to represent "the common people". This short but significant conversation is one of the earliest recorded negotiations in the Malay World concerning the terms of the proper relationship between the ruler and the ruled.

Posted on Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 5:24 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Curating the Oceans: The Future of Singapore's Past

Cross-posted to AHC

The Gaspar Strait runs between the Indonesian islands of Bangka and Belitung, some 300 miles southeast of Singapore, where I sit today, writing these words. Its calm, blue surface belies the snarl of rocks and reefs beneath, and the so-called Belitung Wreck is just one of many ships that met its demise in these perilous waters. In 1998, a German prospector by the name of Tilman Walterfang dove into the strait and struck gold: or rather, some gold, silver, and lots of pots. Over the year, his prospecting company pulled 60,000 handmade artifacts out of the heavily silted waters in the Gaspar, from the wreck of a large ship that we now know sunk sometime in the ninth century. Its contents, known vaguely as ‘the Tang treasure’, have been said to enlarge forever the boundaries of our knowledge of Chinese Tang dynasty maritime history and of the nature and dimensions of early Asian trade. For the next six years or so, the treasure languished in a New Zealand warehouse, while Qatar, Shanghai, Singapore and private collectors all vied vigorously for ownership. In 2005, Singapore bought the lot. And this afternoon, I had the good fortune to be taken for a private tour of it.

Posted on Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 3:46 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

loanwords as social history

[first posted at A Historian's Craft]

I went to a fascinating seminar some time back at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, given by Dr Uri Tadmor on the subject of Malay and Indonesian loanwords. Loanwords, by their nature, can often be strong evidence of sustained cultural interaction -- ephemeral contact is often not enough to stimulate widespread borrowing -- but they can do more than allow us the rather facile conclusion that, for example, Persians and Indians were, once upon a time, in contact with Malays. What Tadmor was really concerned with was to showcase the potential of linguistics, in particular the study of loanwords, for investigating the social history of a region, sometimes even against the grain of received (or convenient) wisdom.

Posted on Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 5:45 AM | Comments (4) | Top

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

fragile things

If you haven't already heard: an archivist's and historian's nightmare has transpired in the city of Cologne. A treasure trove of 65,000 original documents dating from the year 922, including a clutch of Karl Marx manuscripts, letters by Hegel, the personal papers of West Germany's first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and an unbroken series of Cologne's carefully preserved town council meetings dating back to 1376, was destroyed in minutes when the archive building collapsed some days ago.

Being a young student of Southeast Asian history, I came to best know the turmoil of the Japanese Occupation and World War II not through lived experience or by reading memoirs, but through the deep chasm that tears through Southeast Asian archives, hollowing out three years and splitting the twentieth century into two halves: pre-war, post-war. Archives are destroyed quickly in war and conquering: when a new power seeks an erasure of the old, in the upheaval of battle and destruction, in bombings and air raids. Or else they are destroyed slowly by time: crumbling, fading, disintegrating -- the gradual, inevitable entropy of all living things, including memory. But in Cologne, and in other tragedies of this sort, so much vanished in so little time, and in such an absurd, absurdly preventable manner (some think that the Cologne building, state-of-the-art and less than 40 years old, collapsed only because a train line was being built right underneath it -- a claim corroborated, I think, by this photo) that my reaction is more one of bewilderment than anything else. A kind of chasm has opened up in German history now, and time will tell how deeply the loss will be felt.

Posted on Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 8:53 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Monday, December 29, 2008

Drunk History

There can be no better pedagogical tool for college students. Jen Kirkman drinks a bottle and a half of wine and reenacts the sad, proud history of George and Martha Washington's favourite slave, Oney Judge, complete with period costumes, drunken lip syncing, inebriated (but graceful!) hiccups, and extreme historical savvy. Hat tip, and happy new year -- naturally, of course, you'll all be equally productive with your celebratory bottle and a half of wine this New Year's Eve...

Posted on Monday, December 29, 2008 at 10:37 AM | Comments (6) | Top

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

on bad citation

A quick note on bad citation. A while back I wrote a small disgruntled rant about the misquotation of Richard Evans in an article by George Cotkin. It seems that either I'm doomed to forever run across these things, or that bad citation is more rampant than I think. Either way, here is a rather protracted critique I wrote recently of the widely cited views of George Bernard Shaw on Islam. I wondered if there were any Shaw experts around here who might have more to say about it than I have any real scholarly right to.

Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 11:41 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Olaus Magnus' Carta Marina

One of the oldest known maps of the Scandinavian countries and the region around the Baltic Sea is the 1539 Carta Marina (Map of the Sea), a magnificent chart created by Olaus Magnus, an exiled Swedish priest and cartographer living in Italy at the time. The map is filled to every corner with rich, painstakingly detailed drawings of the fantastical beasties that active sailor imaginations populated the seas with: winged fish, sea-dragons, hirsute many-eyed trout, galleon-sized snakes and other monsters worthy of even Hieronymus Bosch.

Posted on Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 9:38 AM | Comments (5) | Top

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

a novel social history

[crossposted to AHC]

I read George Eliot's Middlemarch recently, and it is so absolutely wonderful that I wish to coerce everyone into reading it. Consider this, then, a Trojan horse post. In the guise of rough-hewn, wooden ruminations on social history, novels and parliamentary reform, I shall smuggle Middlemarch and its glory into the unguarded citadel of your reading list.

Posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 5:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, July 7, 2008

Past and Present

(crossposted @ AHC)

I've had the good fortune (in a manner of speaking) to be back in Malaysia at a time of great tumult. Forget soap operas, B-grade movies and amateur fanfic: the past few weeks in Malaysia have outdone fiction. The ongoing trial concerning the gruesome murder of a Mongolian girl and her alleged (sexual) involvement with our Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, his lackeys, and a Russian submarine deal in Paris grows more incredible by the day. Several days ago a private investigator named Balasubramaniam, in capacity as a whistleblower, issued two mutually incompatible Statutory Declarations in rapid succession. The first, issued with his lawyer and the Malaysian opposition party, made explosive and incriminating claims concerning Najib. The second was issued under a new lawyer after he was summoned to the police station, and it entirely reversed the claims of the first statutory declaration, absolving Najib of any involvement. The following day, Balasubramaniam and his family vanished without a trace.

All this comes on the heels of a crazy cavalcade of events.

Posted on Monday, July 7, 2008 at 2:07 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

From the Devil's Dictionary

Past, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs; the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one -- the knowledge and the dream.

An unexpectedly sober entry from Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary: that selfsame tome that deems that Painting, n., is "the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic", that Cabbage, n., is "a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head", and indeed that History, n., is "an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools".

Just thought I'd share.

(Crossposted to AHC)

Posted on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 2:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, January 21, 2008

What are historians doing when they explain things?

This was originally posted on my history blog at A Historian's Craft

I've been thinking more about explanation & causation in history recently. It seems to me that there are structural elements in both film and narrative that are quite similar to the Humean model of causation: that is to say, images or phrases are placed one after the other, and the viewer or reader has a "habit-driven" inclination to infer the (causal) relationship between the two. Examples:

From film: (1) A camera shot shows one person pointing a gun; (2) the camera cuts to another man falling to the ground, accompanied by a gunshot. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (2) happened because of (1).

Or in fiction, we might have this passage:

(3) She refused to go to work today. (4) Her head throbbed with almost military vigour.

Reading the two in succession, we tend to assume a causal relationship, even in the absence of any explicit "because". (Post hoc, ergo propter hoc). By the end of it, the second sentence has become an explanation of the first, Interestingly, in this case we do assume causation, whereas in the following case, we would probably, unless context demanded it, not:

She refused to go to work today. Her cat ate some cheese.

Posted on Monday, January 21, 2008 at 5:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Transatlantic comparisons: Libraries

I've had some opportunity in the last few weeks to talk with people who've had experiences in academe on both sides of the Atlantic pond; the differences seem, to me, extraordinary. Naturally, and perhaps unsurprisingly for those of you familiar with my blog, my first questions are usually about the libraries. Coming from a background of largely Malaysian and Singaporean libraries, my encounter with Cambridge's University Library was something of a messianic experience. I recall wandering about in its cramped, narrow spaces with my neck constantly craned, staring rapturously at the seemingly endless shelves of books fanning out into the North and South wings and fronts -- six floors thereof! -- the eclectic rooms of rare books, manuscripts, reading rooms, and the charming way in which books seemed to spill over onto every available surface, usurping windowsills, floorspace and deskspace with equal abandon.

And so I never gave much thought to what scholars I now know from across the Atlantic have called its, and I quote, "sordid bureaucracy that is in every way designed to extinguish all my ability and indeed desire to pursue any modicum of scholarly research." Some observations follow.

Posted on Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 8:37 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The idea of Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia as a distinct subject of study is a pretty recent development. Before World War II, it existed largely as a kind of 'Little China' or 'Little India' -- that is to say, an extension of the scope of Sinological (East Asian) or Indological (South Asian) studies. Even today, it's still somewhat subsumed under these putative 'parent' civilizations. Here in Cambridge, for example, the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Faculty conducts teaching and research of what they designate the 'major civilizations of the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia'. Southeast Asia isn't on this list, and is rather often studied as a kind of repository, or crossroads, of these greater civilizational influences.

Posted on Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 7:10 AM | Comments (2) | Top

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