Theatres Of Reminiscence: Industrial Heritage Of twentieth Century Singapore
By Loh Kah Seng
Non-fiction/Pagesetters/Paperback/269 pages/$32.10/Books Kinokuniya
4 out of 5
Historian Loh Kah Seng breathes life into the customarily uncared for story of Singapore’s industrial historical past in his new e book, Theatres Of Reminiscence.
It charts the nation’s transformation into an industrialised economic system between the Nineteen Sixties and Eighties, taking a social, ground-up lens which animates the doubtless dry subject material.
By oral historical past interviews, in depth use of images and social media posts full with emojis, Loh effortlessly weaves collectively the official, financial narratives and the lived experiences of the numerous Singaporeans and international staff who took jobs within the nation’s nascent industries.
Although Loh is the principle author, the e book credit a lot of different authors, notably city planner Ly Nguyen, who co-wrote a chapter on German digicam model Rollei’s manufacturing historical past right here.
Loh constantly enriches the financial and political narrative he constructs on how and why Singapore selected to industrialise with private tales of how these jobs modified the lives of the women and men who labored them.
To perform this, he skilfully employs British historian Raphael Samuel’s concept of a “theatre of reminiscence”, which refers to historical past primarily based on folks’s reminiscences of issues, versus official knowledge or different sources.
He makes use of this concept to light up numerous facets of how trade impacted Singaporeans by novel angles.
One instance is how he considers the graveyard shift – a brand new idea in Singapore within the Seventies and Eighties – as one such “theatre of reminiscence”.
He collects and shows staff’ reminiscences of the graveyard shift, versus the definitions of employers or the state, and is ready to paint an in depth, evocative image not simply of the logistics of labor, but in addition how the character of the work formed the social cloth of particular person staff and of Singapore’s society as a complete.
By analyzing these reminiscences, Loh discusses the twin function of girls – who have been coming into the workforce in giant numbers for the primary time after Singapore’s independence, and needed to steadiness the calls for of business and home work – an expectation not positioned on their male counterparts.
All through the e book, Loh’s prose is efficient and versatile, at occasions reaching a poignancy that borders on poetic in speaking folks’s dearly held reminiscences of their youth.
He invokes nostalgia by simplicity and statements of fastidiously chosen reality, by no means romanticising the previous or folks’s expertise of adverse, usually tedious work.
If there’s a quibble, it’s that Loh typically comes throughout as too cautious, too rooted in reporting historical past for the reader, sometimes stopping brief in his evaluation and conclusions and leaving one wanting extra.
In case you like this, learn: Squatters Into Residents: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Hearth And The Making Of Trendy Singapore by Loh Kah Seng (Asian Research Affiliation of Australia: Southeast Asia Publications Collection, 2013, $38 earlier than GST, nuspress.nus.edu.sg), Loh’s seminal e book on the Bukit Ho Swee fireplace, which equally weaves official and oral histories right into a cogent examination of the social results of one among Singapore’s defining disasters.