MOVING BETWEEN MEMORIES: TRACKING SHIFTS AND SLIDES IN PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF WORLD WAR TWO IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Since World War Two ended almost eighty years ago, there has been much discussion on war memory in Singapore. In recent years, besides exploring the Singapore government’s influence over collective war memories, scholars have shifted their focus towards individual war memories as well. However, although scholars have acknowledged that individual war memories can be influenced by a variety of factors, these purported ensuing changes have not been explicitly tracked. Hence, my thesis is an attempt to advance the current scholarship on war memory by applying Thongchai Winichakul’s concept of memory shifts and slides to explore and historicise the potential shifts and slides in individual war memories during the three periods of war remembrance in Singapore. Using thirteen English memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies written by authors of varying ethnicities published at different times over the last seventy years, my thesis explores the narratives of daily life during the war written in these sources. From there, I track the extent of the shifts and slides in the individuals’ war memories. I also utilise Carol Gluck’s concept of the chronopolitics of memory, Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack’s argument about the tension between the individual and collective, and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to offer an explanation as to why those trajectories could be detected and explain the significance of detecting the shifts and slides. In this thesis, I argue that while it may seem that individual war memories significantly shifted and slid to converge with the state or community’s collective war memories, the shifts and slides were largely superficial. Instead, the presence of diverging and contradictory narratives in the individuals’ war memories suggests that individual war memories are much more resistant to shifts and slides than it would appear.