Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History

Why did independent Singapore celebrate two hundred years of its founding as a British colony in 2019? What does Merdeka mean for Singaporeans? And what are the possibilities of doing decolonial history in Singapore? Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History presents essays by historians, literary scholars and artists which grapple with these questions. The volume also reproduces some of the source material used in the play Merdeka / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (Wild Rice, 2019). Taken together, the book shows how the contradictions of independent nationhood haunt Singaporeans' collective and personal stories about Merdeka. It points to the need for a Merdeka history: an open and fearless culture of historical reckoning that not only untangles us from colonial narratives, but proposes emancipatory possibilities.

Alfian Sa’at

Resident Playwright with W!LD RICE. His published works include three collections of poetry, One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia and The Invisible Manuscript, a collection of short stories, Corridor, a collection of flash fiction, Malay Sketches, and three collections of plays – Collected Plays One, Collected Plays Two, and Collected Plays Three, and the published play Cooling-Off Day.

Faris Joraimi

Pursuing his BA(Hons) in History at the Yale-NUS College. His research interests lie in the narrative traditions, cultural politics and intellectual history of the Malay world. He hopes to pursue graduate studies and explore ways in which texts and their materiality reflect broader processes of exchange, circulation and consumption in the early modern Nusantara. He has written for a number of platforms, including s/pores, Mynah Magazine, New Naratif, Karyawan, Passage, Budi Kritik and 天下 (Commonwealth Magazine, Taiwan).

Sai Siew Min

Taipei-based Singaporean historian who researches Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia with a focus on imperial formation in Southeast Asia, the cultural politics of colonialism and nationalism, language, race and Chineseness. She is a founder member of the s/pores collective. Her essays on historiography in Singapore have appeared online in s/pores: new directions in Singapore Studies. Her academic writings have appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Chinese Overseas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. She is also co-editor of the book Reassessing Chinese Indonesians: History, Religion and Belonging.