Peranakan music and multiculturalism in Singapore

Abstract

The Peranakans in Singapore are communities whose cultural practices, customs, and beliefs draw on Malay and Chinese heritage, and they generally trace their ancestry to south Fujian in China and to Melaka in Malaysia. Since the 1980s, Peranakan musical groups in Singapore have performed heterogenous perspectives of who they are through Peranakan theatre, traditional music, and popular songs, drawing on similar hybrid forms of expressive cultures in the British Malaya era. Beginning in the 2000s, Peranakan cultures in Singapore have been catapulted to national and international visibility through public events, television shows, museum exhibitions, and tourist sites. In these state-sponsored events, Peranakans are presented as a bounded and homogenous community, not unlike the categorisation of the Chinese, Malay, and Indian ethnicities which has formed the pillar of multiculturalism policies in Singapore since its independence in 1965. The contrast between these two forms of cultural representation is indicative of how, beginning in the 1980s, Peranakan musical practices had anticipated shifts in the complex correlation between ethnicities, multiculturalism policies, and nation-building in Singapore and became a model to rethink the meanings and values of being Singaporean.