Appropriating the Founder: Raffles and Modern Singapore

Abstract

Abstract: Since 2015, many prominent protest movements around the world have called for the removal of memorials commemorating colonisers, including the Rhodes Must Fall campaign which rallied for the removal of statues commemorating the British coloniser Cecil Rhodes who is known for being one of the architects of the apartheid in South Africa. Singapore, instead, held the Singapore Bicentennial in 2019 to commemorate 200 years since the 'founding' of modern Singapore by the British. One figure who was featured prominently in this act of national remembering is Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), commonly known as the 'founder' of modern Singapore. The government commissioned two works around the poly-marble statue of Raffles. This statue is a copy created by the post-independence government in 1972 that is based on the original bronze installed by the British in 1887. These statues have been appropriated by artists over the years as a critique of colonialism and the selective remembering of Singapore's colonial history by the government. Through a comparative analysis of the memorials of Raffles and the counter-memorials created by the artists, I examine how the statues are used by the long-time ruling party, the People's Action Party (PAP), to perpetuate their hegemonic version of Singapore's history and the norms coded within the statues. I also examine how the artists used the same image of Raffles to resist the collective amnesia cultivated by the state by revealing the selective remembering of and myth-making by the government, and foregrounding the subjectivities of individuals who were written out of Singapore's history.