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I have always liked how the title of Alfian Saat’s collection of poetry captures the contradictions about this business of writing and producing history, all the more so since this is a young poet of my generation who writes with Singaporean sensibilities. He calls this particular collection “History of Amnesia”.
Perhaps not unlike Alfian, I too situate my position and outlook as a historian within this “History of Amnesia” that makes Singapore. I first became interested in history because I was interested in its value in and for Singapore. Yet, for someone who grew up in a place priding itself on the ability to execute strategic and cataclysmic societal transformations, it made sense that Singaporeans had no time and need for history. What was a young person interested in learning more about the discipline to do? History in Singapore only made sense when it was not here and I was not impressed with staid platitudes about “the relevance of history”. So, from Singapore, I grew a second regional wing. I picked up Bahasa Indonesia and learned more about a neighboring country with its own problems with historical absences quite unlike Singapore’s. I did my doctoral research on the Chinese communities in Indonesia. I also grew a third inter-disciplinary wing. I completed my doctoral degree at the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
It took a long journey through graduate school in America, multiple journeys to Indonesia and growing up (and old) in Singapore before I grasped that quite profoundly, history can also be about “something that did not really happen” or that there are many shades to forgetting just as there can be multiple and nuanced meanings underwriting the contingent truths that make “History” look so universal and single. This seems to me particularly true for Southeast Asia and Asia in general where the pace and politics of change has been spectacular. I remain interested in history on multiple levels. History, to me is never simply an empirical discipline about the perfected recovery, realized or projected, of nitty gritty facts. The presence and absence of histories speak to us, as social agents about our complicated relationships to the social and even physical worlds.
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
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Ethnographies of history and historical anthropology including epistemology, ethno-histories, memory studies, oral histories and the archive. Trans-border and diasporic connections, movements and communities Chinese communities in Indonesia and Southeast Asia Singapore history and society |
TEACHING INTERESTS:
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Southeast Asian history |
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Post-war Singapore history |
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Gender studies |
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Historical methodology |
PUBLICATIONS:
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Sai Siew Min and Huang Jianli, “The ‘Chinese-educated’ political vanguards: Ong Pang Boon, Lee Khoon Choy and Jek Yuen Thong” in Lee’s Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard edited by Lam Peng Er and Kevin Tan (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin) 1999 |
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Sai Siew Min, “Eventing the May 1998 affair: problematic representations of violence in contemporary Indonesia” in Violent Conflicts in Indonesia: analysis, representation, resolution edited by Charles Coppel (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) |
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"I have always liked how the title of Alfian Saat’s collection of poetry captures the contradictions... "
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