(Ebook) Heritage, Culture and Identity by Hamzah Muzaini, Brenda S.A. Yeoh ISBN 9781138546936, 1138546933

(Ebook) Heritage, Culture and Identity by Hamzah Muzaini, Brenda S.A. Yeoh ISBN 9781138546936, 1138546933

This book sets itself apart from much of the burgeoning literature on war commemoration within human geography and the social sciences more generally by analysing how the Second World War (1941-45) is remembered within Singapore, unique for its potential to shed light on the manifold politics associated with the commemoration of wars not only within an Asian, but also a multiracial and multi-religious postcolonial context. By adopting a historical materialist approach, it traces the genealogy of war commemoration in Singapore, from the initial disavowal of the war by the postcolonial government since independence in 1965 to it being embraced as part of national historiography in the early 1990s apparent in the emergence since then of various memoryscapes dedicated to the event. Also, through a critical analysis of a wide selection of these memoryscapes, the book interrogates how memories of the war have been spatially and discursively appropriated today by state (and non-state) agencies as a means of achieving multiple objectives, including (but not limited to) commemoration, tourism, mourning and nation-building. And finally, the book examines the perspectives of those who engage with or use these memoryscapes in order to reveal their contested nature as fractured by social divisions of race, gender, ideology and nationality.