Contested Memoryscapes

Hamzah Muzaini is Assistant Professor, Cultural Geography Chair Group, Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Before entering academia, he was heritage consultant, and curator of the Changi Chapel and Museum, a site dedicated to the memory and remembrance of men and women who were incarcerated by the Japanese in Singapore during the Second World War. His research interests relate to war heritage and memoryscapes, conceptualised around postcolonial theory, materiality, and the spatial politics of power and resistance particularly by state and non-state actors in public and everyday spaces. He has also published on backpacking and 'dark tourism' in Southeast Asia, international peace and heritage museums, and Singapore's transborder geographies and histories. His present research looks at 'heritage from below' within the context of cultural theme parks, memory politics as played out in and through cyberspace, and on the urban spatialities of forgetting and immanence. Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost's Chair), Department of Geography, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is also the Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities and she also has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants. She has published widely in these fields. Her latest book titles include The Cultural Politics of Talent Migration in East Asia (Routledge 2012, with Shirlena Huang); Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts (ISEAS press, 2012, with Lai Ah Eng and Francis Collins); Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia (Duke University Press, 2013, with Xiang Biao and Mika Toyota); as well as a paperback reprint of her book Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (originally published in 1996 by Oxford University Press).

Contents: Introduction; The history of war remembrance in Singapore; ’Localizing’ war representations at the Changi Chapel and Museum; The reflections at Bukit Chandu and the politics of ’race’; ’Rescaling’ war memories at Kranji Cemetery and Memorial; Intimations of postmodernity at Fort Siloso as a site of dark tourism; Everyday war memories at the Old Ford Factory Museum (Moff); Memoryscapes of war in everyday public spaces in Singapore; Conclusions; Index.