Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City
Edited by Timothy P. Barnard
NUS Press: 2024
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People who don’t follow the historical profession closely would be surprised, if not amazed, by the changes over the last few decades. When older generations think of history, they typically envision narratives about politics, diplomacy and war, or lengthy biographies of eminent (male) figures from the past. Since the 1970s, however, scholars have increasingly extended the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ historical research to include more work on topics and groups many traditionalists have viewed as marginal, trivial, inconsequential or largely irrelevant. As a result of these boundary extensions, topics with social and cultural history themes—often involving previously neglected groups such as women, LGBTQ+ people, poor people or those who have been criminalised or institutionalised—have risen to the fore.

The scholarly deliverables emerging from new perspectives have had salutary effects on the study of history by broadening the range of human—and as we’ll see below, non-human—experiences captured by researchers. Women’s history and gender/queer history come immediately to mind, as does the history of working class peoples, including those Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to as the lumpenproletariat, comprised of criminals, vagrants, social deviants, outcasts, inmates and more. We’ve also seen the rise of environmental history, concerned with the analysis of the complex, reciprocal and often dialectical interactions between humans and nature over varying scales of time. Despite hiding in plain sight, the place of nature in history, much less the study of human–nature interactions, had generally been neglected by scholars. Today, though, nature is increasingly foregrounded in many works; indeed, often accorded a powerful sense of agency of its own.

• Tags: Issue 37, Peter A. Coclanis, Singapore, Timothy P. Barnard