When the marginalized are the majority: the Raffles Library & Museum in Singapore
| dc.audience | Audience::Library History Special Interest Group | |
| dc.conference.sessionType | Library History | |
| dc.conference.venue | Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre | |
| dc.contributor.author | Luyt, Brendan | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-09-24T09:07:38Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-09-24T09:07:38Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The era of formal colonialism is long behind us and its system of oppression no longer inspires fear or anger. This has generated a certain forgetfulness of the uglier realities of that historical period and in the absence of competing discourses it represents the creation of a long-term collective memory that negates or makes invisible the exploitation, misery and inhumanity that was the cornerstone of the colonial experience for the majority subjected to its control. Library history has a role to play here, if perhaps a small one in the grand scheme of things, for it can provide counter-discourses, in other words, evidence of this other face of colonialism – the neglect of the majority in favour of an alien minority. In this article, the Raffles Museum and Library provides both an example of this nostalgia as well as the possibility of a counter-discourse. | en |
| dc.identifier.citation | Baker, Ernest. 1907. Standard of fiction in public libraries, Library Association Record. Bandyopadhyay, Ranjan. 2012. “Raj revival’ tourism: consuming imperial/colonial nostalgia. Annals of Tourism Research 39 (3): 1718-1722. Braddell, Roland. 1982. The lights of Singapore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Carrier, Esther. Fiction in public libraries (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1965). Fischer-Tine, Harald. (2005), Britain’s other civilizing mission: class prejudice: European ‘loaferism’ and the workhouse-system in colonial India, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 42 (3), 295-338. Kenny, Judith. 1995. Climate, race, and imperial authority, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85:4, 694–695. Luyt, Brendan. 2009. Colonialism, ethnicity and geopolitics in the development of the Singapore National Library. Libraries and the cultural record 44 (4): 418-433. McClellan, Michael. (2003), “Performing empire: opera in colonial Hanoi”, Journal of Musicological Research, 22 (1-2), 135-66. Peleggi, Maurizio. 2005. Consuming colonial nostalgia: monumentalising historic hotels in urban Southeast Asia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 46 (3): 255-265. Raffles Library and Museum (1920), Annual Report, Government Printing Office, Singapore. Raffles Library and Museum (1933), Annual Report, Government Printing Office, Singapore. Seet, K.K. A Place for the People: the Story of a National Library (Singapore: Times Books International, Singapore, 1982). Snape, Robert. Leisure and the rise of the public library (London: Library Association Publishing, 1995). Stoler, Ann Laura. (1989), “Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1), pp. 134-61. Straits Times (1878), 25 May. Straits Times (1939), “Notes of the day: Asiatic reading”, Straits Times, July 24. Sturges, Paul and Alison Barr, The fiction nuisance in nineteenth century British public libraries. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 24 (1) (1991), 23-31. Thomas, Nicholas and Richard Eves. Bad Colonists: the South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke, (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Trocki, Carl. Singapore: Wealth, Power, and the Culture of Control (London: Routledge, 2006). Warren, James. Rickshaw Coolie: a People’s History of Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003). Warwick, Anderson. (1996), Disease, race, and empire, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70 (1), 62-7. | |
| dc.identifier.relatedurl | https://2018.ifla.org/ | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/6322 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.rights | Attribution 4.0 International | |
| dc.rights.accessRights | open access | |
| dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Colonialism | |
| dc.subject.keyword | nostalgia | |
| dc.subject.keyword | library history | |
| dc.subject.keyword | Singapore | |
| dc.title | When the marginalized are the majority: the Raffles Library & Museum in Singapore | en |
| dc.type | Article | |
| ifla.Unit | Section:Library History Special Interest Group | |
| ifla.oPubId | https://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2174/ |
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