Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History

Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His plays with Wild Rice include Hotel (with Marcia Vanderstraaten), The Asian Boys Trilogy, Cooling-Off Day, The Optic Trilogy, Homesick and Merdeka / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (with Neo Hai Bin). He was the winner of the Golden Point Award for Poetry and the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature in 2001. His publications include Collected Plays One, Two, and Three; poetry collections One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia and The Invisible Manuscript; and short-story collections Corridor and Malay Sketches.

Faris Joraimi is pursuing his BA(Hons) in History at the Yale-NUS College. 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. He has written for a number of platforms, including s/pores, Mynah Magazine, New Naratif, Karyawan, Passage, Budi Kritik and 天下 (Commonwealth Magazine, Taiwan). 

Sai Siew Min is a Taipei-based Singaporean historian who researches Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia with a focus on imperial formation in Southeast Asia, the cultural politics of colonialism and nationalism, language, race and Chineseness. She is a founder member of the s/pores collective. Her essays on historiography in Singapore have appeared online in s/pores: new directions in Singapore Studies. Her academic writings have appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Chinese Overseas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. She is also co-editor of the book Reassessing Chinese Indonesians: History, Religion and Belonging.