'Tense Pasts, Present Tensions': Postcolonial Memoryscapes and the Memorialisation of the Second World War in Perak, Malaysia

This thesis is concerned with how the Second World War is memorialised in Perak, Malaysia. It considers memoryscapes (or memory practices and sites) within the state dedicated to the war, established not only by state agencies but also grassroots actors. In terms of findings, the thesis first highlights how the Perak state has sought to ‘postcolonialise’ (read: ‘nationalise’) public representations of what was an event that took place when Malaysia was still part of ‘colonial’ Malaya, and the issues associated with it, particularly how, despite efforts to make the war (and its attendant memoryscapes) something its people could identify with, the state has been criticised as exclusionary of ‘local’ war stories and partial to a ‘foreign’ audience, thus alienating its population and reproducing much of how war commemoration in Perak was when Malaysia was under British rule before. Generally, the thesis demonstrates the fraught nature of memoryscapes and how there can be fundamental limits to which such ‘postcolonialising’ projects may be successfully realised on the ground. The second concern of the thesis is on the ways in which war narratives of the war that are marginalised within official representations may still survive in other forms and on other sub-national scales. In interrogating these memoryscapes ‘from below’, the thesis reveals that, while some locals prefer to mark the war in a more private fashion so as to covertly resist state tendencies to be exclusionary, or out of fear of reprisals from the state (due to remembering controversial aspects of the war past), the most widely-cited reason is still the simple desire to remember according to local customs, religious beliefs and socio-cultural norms. In doing so, it showcases alternative forms of memory-making that problematises traditional understandings of war commemoration common within prevailing literature, and highlights ways in which contestations against elite memory and heritage practices may not always emerge in oppositional fashion or enacted in clearly overt and public ways but also through the absence of voice. Additionally, the thesis also challenges the tendency to celebrate grassroots practices of memory-making as necessarily ‘recuperative’ of official exclusions of the past. As the situation in Perak exemplifies, these too can be just as political and exclusionary, where, in many cases, the locals themselves may represent barriers to emergent war memories as much as they can be the champions. Lastly, the thesis touches upon the ways in which ‘the material’ may be appropriated towards forgetting the war, not only officially by the state but also by those who went through the war as ordinary civilians. It then illustrates how, despite efforts ‘to put the past behind them’, sometimes memories of war can still ‘emerge unbidden’ to involuntarily force individuals to confront the war past even when they would rather not recall it. In doing so, the thesis demonstrates how material legacies of the war can be utilised not only to presence, but also to absence, the war, although at times ‘the material’ too can undermine efforts to render the past passé. More broadly, the thesis thus contributes not only to debates about postcolonial memory-making and politics, and the complex nature of grassroots remembrances, but also the role of materiality within processes of forgetting, specifically in showing how ‘the material’ can at times exercise agency on humans as much as the reverse is possible. The thesis is based on data collected via textual analysis, participant observation and interviews

Localizing memory scapes, building a nation: Commemorating the second world war in Singapore

Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Theming and Imagineering as a Placemaking Strategy – A Case Study of Islamic Tourism in Malaysia

Malaysia has deployed many tourism themes, beginning with “Malaysia, Truly Asia” to the more temporal-specific themes of “Visit Malaysia Year” and “MyFest 2015” to portray its uniqueness within the context of the multiracial country. Malaysia aims to capitalise on the diversity of its attractions and transform them, via spatial imagineering, into fodder to materialise its marketing image as a Muslim country. Using the key concept of thematisation and imagineering, this study provides an understanding not only on how people shape places materially, socially and symbolically, but also the ways in which this has been contested. Drawing on in-depth interviews with local Malaysians from different ethnics background as the indirect stakeholders, the findings offer the constructivist and post-structuralism perspectives on seeing how Islamic tourism has been received in terms of making the country unique in order to enhance ethnic harmony, as much as to capture tourist imagination and capital investments to create new country imaginaries. Hence, to achieve the objectives of engineering of societies as meant to encourage locals to rediscover local places and attractions, and bridge understanding between multi-ethnicity populations towards the nationbuilding

Change, Choice, and Commercialization: Backpacker Routes in Southeast Asia

South-East Asia has the oldest and largest backpacker trails. This paper examines the geographies of such flows, drawing upon the largest survey to date of backpackers in Asia using qualitative research to survey the key changes from the 1970s to the 2000s. Backpacker trails have changed significantly and new routes have emerged including the ‘northern trail’ (Bangkok - Cambodia - Vietnam - Laos). It is to be expected that routes change as backpackers constantly seek new places, pioneering for later mass tourism. However, this paper suggests that using institutionalization as a framework, these changing trails and backpacker ‘choices’ can be seen as driven by growing commercialization and institutionalization. This then operates in combination with external variables (travel innovations - low cost airlines, and new transport networks); exogenous shock (political instability, terrorism); and growing regional competition from emerging destinations such as Vietnam and Cambodia

Personal reflections on formal Second World War memories/ memorials in everyday spaces in Singapore

Introduction Scattered around the island of Singapore, and complementing the myriad bounded spaces of museums, preserved forts and war cemeteries established over the years, is yet another way the nation commemorates the country’s involvement in the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation of 1941-1945: the comparably unremarkable markers of history that have been formally inserted into more quotidian surroundings. Among these are the ‘open-book’-shaped plaques instituted as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1995 (Wong 2001), some so blended into the landscape that they can be missed. That is, unless, armed with a proper guide (e.g. NHB 2013), one goes on self-choreographed trails or accidentally stumbles upon them. Although a few are accompanied by material traces (and many of these have already been readapted for other uses), others are nothing more than reminders of what was, memory of past events still seen as noteworthy.</p

Necrogeography

Necrogeography, or the study of “deathscapes,” is the inquiry into spaces associated with death, dying, and the dead. This entry discusses the key strands of research that define this subfield, and some of the emerging themes

Rethinking the living museum concept `from below?

10.1080/08873631.2020.1800320Journal of Cultural Geography38181-10

Informal heritage-making at the Sarawak Cultural Village, East Malaysia

Scholars have always been fascinated with cultural theme parks as tourism attractions or as vehicles for identity formations. With respect to the latter, the focus has been on how these consumption landscapes also portend spaces of representation that mobilize certain attributes of ethnic groups within territorial boundaries as a means to bind them together and link them to their terrains, although these ideological exercises are often times contested by the very people they seek to depict. Yet, comparably less emphasis has been paid on how local visitors can themselves draw upon their own cultural reserves to rethink the meanings of these spaces to make them more relatable. Drawing on participant ethnography and interviews with key staff and visitors, this paper examines how locals have sought to unmake and remake one such theme park, the Sarawak Cultural Village, to enhance resonance for them and for other visitors, at times even going against intended narratives. In so doing, the paper extends current scholarship beyond seeing themed spaces just as places where the formal employment of heritage for identity-building may be contested; they are also where meanings can be (re)negotiated ‘from below’, proffering more possibilities for co-constructive heritage-making