Fact And Fiction In Contemporary Malaysian History: Some Dominant Themes

Speaker : Dr Cheah Boon Kheng
Date : Saturday, 10 December 2011
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Venue: Neptune Room, Ipoh Swimming Club,
144 Jalan Raja Dr Nazrin Shah, 31350 Ipoh
Cost: RM30 per person (inclusive of dinner)

About the talk:

Changes in people’s historical thinking and controversial issues in Malaysian history have emerged in the public sphere lately.

New paradigms in historical writing, such as postmodernism and postcolonialism, are also influencing the intellectual tradition of the professional historian.

Is there historical truth or reality? Was Malaya or were the Borneo states ever ‘colonized’? Should the role of the MCP insurgency be re-evaluated? Should
Malaysian school history textbooks be rewritten? A Malaysian historian examines to what extent these current historical problems and the new ideological concerns present challenges that might undermine the commitment of the historian to an honest and truthful representation of the past.

 

About Dr Cheah Boon Kheng:

Dr Cheah Boon Kheng was formerly professor of history at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang until his retirement. Since then he has taken up visiting fellowships at the Australian National University, the University of Singapore, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the Universiti Sains Malaysia. He is the author of several books including The Masked Comrades (1979), Red Star Over Malaya (1983) and Malaysia: the Making of a Nation (2002), To’ Janggut: Legends, Histories and Perceptions of the 1915 Rebellion in Kelantan (NUS Press, Singapore 2006). His latest book is New Perspectives and Research on Malaysian History (2007).