建构“马来亚”想象 ：新加坡华人的阅读经验与知识传递（1945-1965） = CONSTRUCTING THE IMAGINATION OF "MALAYA": READING EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER OF CHINESE IN SINGAPORE（1945-1965）

Abstract

This study takes a perspective of the history of reading and focuses on three reading spaces commonly found in post-war Singapore's urban space - bookstores, bookstalls, and libraries--to explore how the reading practices taken here helped constructed the identity of a Malayan community by producing and transferring the knowledge, concepts, consciousness, and imagination amongst the expanding Chinese readership. These reading spaces are not seen conventionally as the production sites of mainstream knowledge and identity awareness like what schools have done. But these were spaces where ordinary people read. In examining the changes of reading practices, readers, and books found in these spaces, this research shows that in the course of nation-building, the governments, social elites, public, and other power parties did actively or passively produce, disseminate, interpret, and thus construct the knowledge and imagination of “Malaya” to shape the identity of individuals and groups through “reading”.