Contemporary Singapore Research Articles

Becoming Chinese in the Malay world: colonialism, migration and history in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article raises a neglected discussion on the intertwined connections between Chinese migration and European imperial formations in the Malay world using Singapore as a focal point. Working from the perspective of critical historiography in contemporary Singapore, the article highlights limitations in current approaches using concepts such as “Chinese migration” and “Chinese diaspora.” I suggest using “the Malay world” to surface the specificity of the coloniality of migratory Chineseness in this region on account of the transethnic and fluid character of the Malay world. Using the Malay world as method and conceptual scaffolding helps to contextualise Chinese migration to Singapore within Indigenous patterns of movement, settlement and identity formation in a region disrupted and reorganised with European imperial formations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unravelling nationalistic framing of masculine and patriarchal histories of diasporic Chineseness, this approach critiques efforts in myth-making about Chineseness and Singaporean exceptionalism in this region.

Old “cowboy towns”: enduring democratic enclaves as Singapore’s alternative digital histories, 1994–2011

Once overshadowed in a tightly controlled media environment, alternative voices in contemporary Singapore found new avenues through the emerging cyberspace from the 1990s. As irreverent satire, critical commentaries, community networks and knowledge repositories blogs, websites and forums, they came to reflect the digital presence and extension of a nascent, autonomous and enduring digital public culture. Extending the discussion of democratic enclaves within authoritarian political cultures, this article positions such sites as democratic enclaves within alternative digital histories, once alluded by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong as “cowboy towns.” Amidst the creeping trends of “flawed democracies” as historical precedence, these sites are reminder to the precarious democratic foundations, possibilities and networks pioneered over the early years of the internet.

Southeast Asia. Voices from the underworld: Chinese Hell deity worship in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia By Fabian Graham Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 280. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Southeast Asia. Voices from the underworld: Chinese Hell deity worship in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia By Fabian Graham Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 280. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Disabling Lee Kuan Yew and the Singapore Story: The Problematic Logics of Inclusion in Contemporary Singapore

ABSTRACT Representations of Lee since his passing have focused on discussing the role that he played in building Singapore and the politics of remembering him. This article takes a different approach, underpinned by developments towards the incorporation of disabled people in life both in Singapore and internationally. Embracing disability as a valid form of embodiment as well as an important source of critical knowledge, this article uses a disability analytic to disable both the figure of Lee Kuan Yew and the Singapore Story. It does so to expose the underpinning logics and contradictions surrounding disability, which affords opportunities to reimagine a more inclusive Singapore.

Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell Deity Worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia by Fabian Graham

Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell Deity Worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia by Fabian Graham

A Study of United Temple in Singapore—Analysis of Union from the Perspective of Sub-Temple

This paper attempts to examine the formation path of the United Temple. Since research on the United Temple has focused more on its organization and religious practice in contemporary Singapore, the paper looks at the sub-temples under the Singapore United Temple, analyzing their paths toward unification from a more extended historical perspective. The authors divide sub-temples into three categories: ancestral temples (血缘庙), geographic temples (地缘庙), and deity-related temples (神缘庙) and compare their flexible strategies. This paper tries to explain how the formation of the United Temples was influenced by multiple spatial, social, and cultural factors. The blood lineage, religion, and regional ties from the homeland could still be essential when the localized, community-based social links beyond the boundaries play an equally crucial integrative role in forming United Temples. It is the contention of the authors of this paper to study the United Temple—the unique religious space in Singapore—as the potential syncretic field of the present and the past.

‘True blue’ or part Peranakan? Peranakan Chinese identity, mixedness and authenticity in Singapore

ABSTRACT While no longer associated with colonial economic and political privilege, Peranakan Chinese identity is now often viewed as an ‘authentic’ heritage in contemporary Singapore that is made visible through hybrid cultural and material markers. But for the Peranakan community, what does it mean to be authentically Peranakan in post-colonial Singapore? This paper explores concepts of hybridity and authenticity for Peranakan individuals, highlighting how being Peranakan is informed by ideas of belonging, mixedness and purity, from being ‘true blue’ to generational shifts towards being part Peranakan. Drawing on critical mixed race theory, the paper provides an historical overview of Peranakan identity in the region, tracing how ‘authentic’ Peranakan-ness has changed over time. Using a series of narrative interviews with self-identified Peranakan individuals across three generations, the paper explores public and private representations of identity, and how mixedness and purity are seen as being ‘authentic’ aspects of Peranakan culture.

Affective governance as multimodal discursive practice in Singapore’ COVID-19 vaccination video

Drawing on scholarship on affective-discursive practice and employing a critical multimodal analytic approach, this paper examines how an official vaccination campaign video from Singapore affectively engages with audiences through the construction of various social relationships and identities. Analysis of the multimodal images identifies four salient themes in the video: (1) a harmonious neighborhood comprising inter-ethnic friendships, (2) a paternalistic father-child relationship, (3) a male-dominant family model, and (4) a nostalgic past-present relationship. The analysis shows that affect is discursively mobilized in the orchestration of embodied modes, auditory, and visual modes via strategic filming and editing techniques. Based on the analysis, the authors argue that the video not only functions to subtly persuade the public to get vaccinated but should also be seen as part of a broader move toward an ‘affective politics’ which aims to mobilize the public, reinforce social cohesion and manage the global pandemic crisis in contemporary Singapore.

Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell Deity Worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia, Fabian Graham (2020)

Review of: Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell Deity Worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia, Fabian Graham (2020) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 280 pp., ISBN 978-1-52614-057-9, h/bk, £80.00

Becoming a Confucian in Contemporary Singapore: The Case of Nanyang Confucian Association

Using the Nanyang Confucian Association (NCA) as a case study, this paper explores the multi-faceted processes through which a segment of Singapore’s Chinese community constructs its self-identity based on an understanding of Confucianism that dismisses its religious attributes while underscoring the ethnic and cultural dimensions. Tracing the history of the association since its formation in 1914, the paper hopes to contribute to recent overseas Chinese studies on the rethinking of the notion of the Chinese diaspora within the context of the formation, circulation, and contest of a global Chinese identity by asking the following questions: Does identifying with the Confucian tradition necessarily require one to acknowledge their connection with China? Would a self-proclaimed Confucian be perceived as someone who looks to China for ethnic and cultural affiliation and thus appears less local? The authors argue that, while still acknowledging the spatial–temporal centrality of China as the origin of Confucianism and Chinese civilization, leaders of the NCA clearly intended to simultaneously position the NCA at the center of global Confucian activism. What emerges from the processes initiated by the NCA in constructing its identity is a complex overlay of history, geography, and culture that gives rise to a vision of multiple centers.

(Un)tethered masculinities, (mis)placed modernities: Queering futurity in contemporary Singapore

This article considers how socio-political prescriptions can bring about the queering of futurity in Singapore. In Singapore, state-sponsored narratives of progress view futurity in terms that are bound to place, and reproduced through the heteronormative family unit. These factors have caused constructions of masculinity to be tethered to the family, and placed within public housing. Recently, this narrative has become an increasingly inflexible and marginalizing construct that can cause straight males to be queered by their prescribed futures. In contrast, gay males are more likely to be untethered from their families, and thus occupy “unplaced” positions in Singapore’s social structure.

Fabian Graham, Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell Deity Worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia

Fabian Graham, Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell Deity Worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia

Reading New Asian Tropicalities in Contemporary Singapore

This essay theorizes the cultivation, suppression, and cooptation of new forms of Asian tropicality in the material and cultural productions of contemporary Singapore. Originating in Anglo-American imperial discourse of the eighteenth century, tropicality suggests the social construction of the “tropics” as a space in opposition to European and North American temperate environments. Reading the material space of the massive eco-development Gardens by the Bay and a series of contemporary literary texts by Kevin Kwan, Sandi Tan, and Ng Yi-Sheng, the author argues that these texts produce and reflect a contemporary cultural moment that is predicated on climate control and environmental engineering and haunted by the legacies of coloniality and developmental politics. The theorization of new Asian tropicalities provides a new critical lens with which to consider the relationships and connections between these constructions of nature and the material and cultural texts of twenty-first-century Singapore—a model of urban ecology that has an outsized influence on other Asian cities.

The Hungry Ghost Festival in Singapore: Getai (Songs on Stage) in the Lunar Seventh Month

This paper examines the interaction between state power and the everyday life of ordinary Chinese Singaporeans by looking at the Hungry Ghost Festival as a contested category. The paper first develops a theoretical framework building on previous scholars’ examination of the contestation of space and the negotiation of power between state authorities and the public in Singapore. This is followed by a short review of how the Hungry Ghost Festival was celebrated in earlier times in Singapore. The next section of the paper looks at the differences between the celebrations in the past and in contemporary Singapore. The following section focuses on data found in local newspapers on Getai events of the 2017 Lunar Seventh Month. Finally, I identify characteristics of the Ghost Festival in contemporary Singapore by looking at how Getai is performed around Singapore and woven into the fabric of Singaporean daily life.

Intellectual consciousness and the negation of the intellectual class: Kuo Pao Kun’s pre-detention drama and its context

ABSTRACT Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) is the most important dramatist in contemporary Singapore. His post-1980s works are extensively analysed but his artistic practices of his early years, though equally important, have rarely been discussed, partly due to the fact that relevant materials are available mainly in Chinese. This article provides a close examination of Kuo’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting with a detailed delineation of his personal experience in relation to the development of his social and intellectual and consciousness, my discussion situates Kuo and his work within several layers of context, including modern Chinese cultural and intellectual thought and activism, especially the May Fourth movement, and the anti-colonial social and political activism of the Chinese-speaking intellectual community in Singapore from the 1950s.

Singapore as non-place: National cinema through the lens of temporal heterogeneity

This article suggests that Singapore and Singapore cinema serve as a good site to return to debates surrounding the national. First, I investigate the disconnect between the present and the past in contemporary Singapore and argue that contemporary Singapore cinema is microcosmic of the nation’s uncomfortable relationship with the past. Drawing from Marc Augé’s work in order to understand this temporal disconnect, I propose to think of the nation as a non-place, where the nation is thought of as a liminal entity. Ultimately, I call for a reconsideration of Singapore cinema through the lens of temporal heterogeneity, suggesting that the notion of the nation as a non-place allows us to not only understand the evolving present of the nation(al) but also cinema’s role in helping access the past.

Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture, and Identity in Contemporary Singapore by Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and Chee-Hoo Lum

Reviewed by: Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture, and Identity in Contemporary Singapore by Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and Chee-Hoo Lum JinXing (Gene) Lai (bio) Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture, and Identity in Contemporary Singapore. Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and Chee-Hoo Lum. Singapore: Springer, 2018. 248 pp., color illustrations, bibliographies, glossary. ISBN: 978-981-13-1010-2 (hardcover), $109.99; ISBN: 978-981-13-1011-9 (e-book), $84.99. Semionauts of Tradition: Music, Culture and Identity in Contemporary Singapore, by anthropologist Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray and music education scholar Chee-Hoo Lum, is a timely book that provides an update on the Singaporean music scene. It contributes to "a deeper understanding of the diverse, fluid, interconnected, and constantly evolving assemblages that make up Singaporean musicians' contemporary identities and creative practice" (8). In this ethnographically rich book, the authors seek to mitigate a balance in power relations between researchers and interlocutors, and accordingly they draw heavily on the voices of their interlocutors in their discussions. In chapter 1, Lizeray and Lum define the theoretical groundings for the book. Borrowing from Nicolas Bourriaud, an art critic and curator, they [End Page 154] interpret their case studies using the notions of semionaut and radicant. According to Lizeray and Lum, "A semionaut … is a person who navigates signs. This entails constructing pathways through a field of signs, and creating new and uncharted connections between hitherto unrelated ones. A semionaut of tradition is one that does so with traditional signs or signs relating to tropes and understandings of tradition" (2). Additionally, Lizeray and Lum use radicant to interpret their interlocutors' efforts to negotiate their musical and ethnical identity in different contexts. Radicant and semionaut act as heuristic tools that help us to interpret the constantly changing identity of a globalized, multicultural city such as Singapore (6). In chapter 2, Lizeray examines the "Singapore sound" ideology, derived from the official racial categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others, or the CMIO model, which celebrates differences among Singaporeans. Musicians who are engaged in the "Singapore sound" ideology are given incentives and receive more performance opportunities from government agencies. Lizeray notes that most of her interlocuters disdain the Singapore sound ideology. They seek to create music that is genuinely artistic rather than music that adheres to bureaucratic ideology. In chapter 3, Lum examines the benefits of collaborative creative processes. He notes that collaborative creative processes among musicians from different musical traditions encourage the broadening, deepening, and diversifying of their musical vocabularies. Chapter 4 features NADI Singapura, Singapore's first Malay percussion group that performs on an eclectic collection of percussion instruments from the Malay archipelago. In this chapter, Lizeray discusses how members of NADI Singapura preserve Malay traditional music while actively innovating from it. She observes that the elements that have led to their success include the notion of community as family, charismatic leadership, Malayness as a group ethos, and the ensemble's open-mindedness to innovations. In chapter 5, Lum examines his interlocutors' perspectives on fusion. Among the perspectives, a few points emerged. First, musicians create fusion music to attract younger audiences and to change audiences' perceptions of their musical tradition. Second, through collaborations, musicians exchange musical ideas and learn new musical languages. Finally, fusion is necessary, but there must be some form of gatekeeping. This ensures that the musical tradition is still recognizable despite the integration of new musical elements. Lizeray examines three local Chinese music ensembles in chapter 6—Nen (念), MUSA, and SA (仨)—as well as three Singaporean Chinese musicians based in New York City and Melbourne, Australia. Lizeray highlights that contemporary musicians' creative endeavors and personal affinities transcended racial boundaries and assumptions of cultural purity. Lizeray arrives [End Page 155] at her argument by comparing how Singaporean Chinese musicians based in Singapore and overseas express their Chinese identity in idiosyncratic ways through their musical works and performance practices. In chapter 7, Lum discusses how musicians used nostalgia as "hooks" in their music and performance practices to engage Singaporean audiences. These hooks (145) include the use of familiar rhythmic patterns and folk tunes, the creation of music videos that feature Singapore's landscapes, and the participation in collaborative music projects that revitalize the...

“Si Geena” (Brat): Un-Social Digital Juveniles’ Episodic Resistance in Singapore

Abstract This paper explores episodes of provocative online articulations and the accompanying angry public reactions as part of the cultural politics of juvenile online resistance in contemporary Singapore. Rather than viewing such delinquency as ‘youth deficits’, this paper seeks a literary-culturalist standpoint in exploring the uninhibited audacity of these public online displays. We perceive such performances as reflecting the critical and socially unrestrained emotional subjectivities of ‘youth mirroring deficits’ of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’. The authors propose to appropriate the colloquial Singaporean Chinese Hokkien term of Si Geena (brat), a label commonly used to describe these offending personalities, to frame the dynamics of youth resistance, and new media in Singapore. Si Geena are often un-social digital juvenile provocateurs baiting moral outrage and public indignation. In turn, societal responses to the Si Geena’s episodic resistance reveal the contradictions, insecurities, and volatility of Singapore’s reactive public.

‘This is a gathering of lovers’: Islamic self‐help and affective pedagogies in contemporary Singapore

AbstractIn Singapore, the proliferation of Islamic classes drawing from self‐help rhetoric, popular culture, the Qur'an, and Hadith allude to the increased appeal of affective pedagogies to Muslim youth. Taught by Singaporean Al‐Azhar University graduates, the classes predominantly attracted university‐educated, minoritized Malay Muslim women. Through the use of affective pedagogies, the teachers reframed Islamic piety to foreground three forms of love: self, divine, and romantic. Extending scholarship on racialized affect, this article interrogates the ways in which the teachers’ affective pedagogies mediated young women's anxieties within a neoliberalizing context, and the latter's negotiations of their newly acquired religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian precarities. While anthropology's foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of the theoretical presuppositions of affect theory, the latter expands our understanding of piety projects as not merely concerned with ethical self‐discipline, but entangled with broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects whose capacity to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. By placing anthropological theory on Islamic piety in a dialogical tension with affect theory, I highlight the forms of affective religious sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular sites of minoritized Muslim subject formation.

Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell deity worship in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia by Fabian Graham

Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell deity worship in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia by Fabian Graham