Do you love museums or hate them? Are they curio cabinets displaying old junk or treasure chests filled with carefully curated objects that transport you to another time and place? In this episode, Max walks us around the National Museum of Singapore. Along the way, he admits how distant he feels from the exhibits and tries to understand why. To do so he talks to NUS professor TC Chang, who speaks about Benedict Anderson’s idea of the imagined community and how this powerful notion plays out in museums and songs for National Day in Singapore.
Special thanks to Dr Chang Tou Chuang, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
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Anderson, Benedict. (2006). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. 2nd ed. London; New York: Verso. https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqp012
Gillen, J. (2014). “Tourism and nation-building at the War Remnant’s Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(6), 1307-1321. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.944459
Kong, Lily & Yeoh, Brenda S.A. (1997). ‘The construction of national identity through the production of ritual and spectacle: an analysis of National Day parades in Singapore’, Political Geography, 16(3), 213-239. https://doi.org/10.1016/0962-6298(95)00135-2
Ooi, Can-Seng. (2009). ‘The Orient responds: tourism, orientalism and the national museums of Singapore”, Ratasatra San [Bulletin of the Faculty of Political Sciences, Thammasat University]. 30(2) (May – August), 113-155. (in Thai, translated by Chewasit Boonyakiet) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289108644/download
Ooi, Can-Seng. (2010), ‘Histories, tourism and museums: re-making Singapore’. Heritage Tourism in Southeast Asia. (eds) M. Hitchcock, V.T. King, and M. Parnwell. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 83-102. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:856223/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Ooi, Can-Seng (2001), ‘Dialogic Heritage: time, space and visions of the National Museum of Singapore’. Interconnected Worlds: Tourism in Southeast Asia. (eds) Teo, P., Chang, T.C. and Ho K.C. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 176-192. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(03)00053-7
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