The State and the New Society: The Role of the Arts in Singapore Nation-building

Abstract

This paper takes an historical perspective on the trajectory of Singapore's arts and cultural landscape from 1965 to 2000. It examines the arts and cultural field as an ideological site within which the People's Action Party government constantly sought to reinvent or vision a new society. From harnessing the arts for the task of creating “civilised” and “cultured” citizens immediately after independence, as well as to play out multicultural fantasies, to the government's ‘Global City for the Arts' project in the 1990s for economic imperatives, arts and culture has not only been ideologically instrumental for nation-building purposes but also malleable to the ruling elite's changing visions of Singapore society. The PAP government's deployment of art to establish orthodoxy is a recurring feature in the paper, including its cooption of “renaissance” themes as early as 1980, thus purging ideals of romanticism from public discourse. The paper concludes that Singapore's cultural policy, although driven by economic impulses, will continue to be an important ideological instrument for nation-building.