About Faris Joraimi
Faris is currently a senior at Yale-NUS College, majoring in History. 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. Most recently, he has co-edited Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History, a compilation of essays on decolonising Singaporean history.
Notes from the Interview
[1] The Octant is a student-run newspaper at Yale-NUS College. Faris wrote an op-ed advocating for the inclusion of the Sejarah Melayu (trans. The Malay Annals) into the Common Curriculum, which can be found here. Since 2019, the Sejarah Melayu has been taught to Yale-NUS freshmen under the Literature & Humanities I sequence.
[2] Jan van der Putten translates and studies traditional Malay texts from the Riau Islands and Malayan popular culture. He has contributed to Tales of the Malay World : Manuscripts and Early Books (2018), of which “Introduction: Surfing the Literary Waves of Insular Southeast Asia” is an excellent introductory resource to Malay print culture.
Vladimir Braginsky, Professor Emeritus at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), researches Malay and Indonesian literatures.
Liaw Yock Fang was a renowned expert on Malay and Indonesian language and literature. He has written language textbooks on Malay and Indonesian. Liaw was part of a generation of Chinese scholars who took a keen interest in the Malay World, which they saw as their home, including Linda Chen, Goh Choo Keng, and Lim Huat Boon. He died in 2016.
[3] s/pores is an e-journal dedicated to Singaporean historical and cultural studies. Faris authored a piece on Wardah Books, a bookstore specialising in books for Muslim readers, and co-authored another piece on the intellectual legacy of Kampong Glam, a historical district where the Sultan and the Malay community once resided.
[4] Mynah Magazine is a print magazine (a real rarity in today’s digital culture) themed around uncovering Singapore’s untold stories.
[5] The Online Citizen, an independent Singaporean news outlet, reported on a Facebook post that Faris had written about Dr. Hong Lysa, a Singaporean historian. The piece can be found here.
[6] Here is Alfian Sa’at’s and Faris’s piece A History of Malay Singaporeans in 10 Objects.
[7] MERDEKA / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (trans. Free) is a play by Alfian Sa’at and Neo Hai Bin which dramatises historical moments eclipsed in the dominant narrative of Singaporean history, presenting an alternative view of the founding of Singapore, and of public demonstrations like the 1954 Chinese Middle School Students’ Movement. The opening production by local theatre company W!LD RICE (where Alfian is Residential Playwright) ran from 10 October – 2 November 2019.
You can consult Alfian’s research booklist here. These booklists are useful reading lists on Singaporean history (of course, including Raffles Renounced).
The pillar of books Alfian Sa’at ploughed through to write the play – and these are just some of the ones in English….
Posted by Ivan Heng on 2019 October 9, Wednesday
On 6 Feb 2021, Ethos Books also hosted a live webinar “What is a Merdeka History?” with the contributors to Raffles Renounced. Both the webinar and notes from it are publicly available here and here.
[8] The Amateur Intellectual:
The intellectual today ought to be an amateur, someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies. In addition, the intellectual’s spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.
Edward Said, Representations of The Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York, Vintage Books, 1994).