Oral History in Southeast Asia ― Memories and Fragments

Elderly Southeast Asians experienced great changes in their lives – of war and violence, of the imposition of the nation-state, of economic development – and remember them in different ways. Their oral histories may bear the influence of state-sanctioned narratives, attempt to speak truth to power or reconcile individual and official memories. By taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments considers the relationship of these fragments of memory to dominant accounts; it unravels the complex ways through which people remember and make sense of their pasts.

Kah Seng Loh is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. He is author of The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (co-authored 2012).

Stephen Dobbs is Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He is author of The Singapore River: A Social History 1819-2002 (2002).

Ernest Koh is Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is author of Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore (2010) and Diaspora At War: The Chinese of Malaya between Empire and Nation 1937-1945 (forthcoming in 2013).