Identity In Singapore Research Articles

The Identity Dilemma of Chinese Immigrants in Singapore from the Perspective of Intercultural Communication and Identity Negotiation: A Case Study of the Chinese Language Movement of Singapore Chamber of Commerce

This paper is based on the background of many Chinese immigrants to Singapore in recent years. Singapore is a multicultural country. The Chinese identity in Singapore is also influenced by multiple factors such as history and culture. This paper studies the causes and status quo of the identity dilemma of the Chinese in Singapore, which provides a reference for China's research in this field and promotes the development of China-Singapore relations. This study is based on the intercultural communication theory and the consultative identity theory, using case analysis to draw the conclusion that the current Singaporean Chinese are faced with a dilemma in the identity process, and put forward suggestions on this phenomenon: Singaporean Chinese should actively negotiate to carry out innovative development on the basis of protecting the fundamental development of identity culture. Understanding and helping Singaporean Chinese to form an identity and value system is conducive to promoting the positive development of China-Singapore relations under the background of globalization.

‘Oh No, The Poem is in Malay’: Examining Student Responses to Linguistic Diversity in Two Multicultural Asian Classrooms

ABSTRACT Hitherto, student responses to ethically oriented pedagogies in Literature classrooms have rarely been studied in non-western, multicultural contexts, and often assume monolingual text selections in English. As an Outer Circle English-using society, Singapore presents a multicultural Asian context worth studying where students connect aesthetic analysis with ethical issues. In this paper, I extend theorisations of ethical criticism concerned with constructing ethical meaning to interpretive discourse in classroom settings. I draw upon Derek Attridge’s notion of responsible readings to examine students’ responses to linguistic diversity in two multicultural Asian Secondary Four (Grade 10 equivalent) Literature classes from a co-designed unit on race and identity in Singapore in a larger study. Focusing on their translingual dispositions, I analyse how students express receptive and resistant responses in comparing three English translations of the Malay poem ‘Di Tengah Alam’ by Hadijah Rahmat, when minority-race students are linguistically privileged and majority-race students are linguistically disadvantaged.

Kiasu (Fear of Losing Out)

Abstract: “Kiasu,” a Hokkien term, which directly translates as the “fear of losing out” is synonymous with the Singapore identity. Yet, there has been little empirical research investigating this indigenous psychological construct in Singapore. This paper first delves into Singapore’s Kiasu culture and existing research of Kiasu, which diverges on the operationalization and measurement of Kiasu as a psychological construct. While early research conceptualized Kiasu as a behavioral tendency, more recent investigations have begun to construe Kiasu as a mindset. Next, we review Kiasu-related outcomes in four domains: academic performance, learning strategies, well-being, and creativity. Finally, we propose a new theoretical framework integrating current research to guide future research directions. Specifically, the proposed integrated model is composed of Kiasu antecedents, individual Kiasu mindset, Kiasu behaviors, and Kiasu outcomes with moderators of normative Kiasu mindset and incentive system in the context. We believe that this proposed integrated model will help us better understand the prevalent Kiasu mindset and behavior in Singapore.

Youth Development and Identity in Singapore's Tian Yun Beijing Opera Society

The history of immigration is intrinsically related to the growth of Beijing Opera in Singapore. Since the turn of the century, as China's economy has continued to grow, a growing number of Chinese living abroad have started to seek out familiar Chinese voices and deepen their links to the nation. In The Tian Yun Beijing Opera Society aggressively welcomes new immigrants while also assuming the duty of youth development. The overseas Chinese young are now dealing with difficult cultural adaptation and identity crises as a result of postmodernism and the internet information age. The Tian Yun Beijing Opera Society is actively fostering a new generation of Beijing Opera enthusiasts by encouraging secondary school students to study the opera and establishing a youth acting clubs. This makes Beijing Opera an essential link in fostering the development of overseas Chinese cultural communities and strengthening ethnic group cohesion.

Projecting nostalgia: Portrayal of memoryscapes in local cinema as place attachment for community‐driven redevelopment of Singapore landscapes

‘Memoryscapes,’ the intangible expression of memories perceived through physical landscapes, are designed by the state to reinforce national identity in Singapore. However, state‐curated memoryscapes become contested when diverging and diverse memories of the people, which manifests as place attachment, are overlooked. The easy accessibility of content creation and consumption empowers people to bypass the perceived rigidity and performativity of top‐down community engagement to express their nuanced opinions on contentious memoryscapes through various media and artform. For example, local cinema that expresses the richness and complexity of place attachment. This research employs a ‘grounded theory’ approach, using local cinema as data to inductively construct a localized conception of place attachment. Findings reveal place attachment as an incremental range of behaviours with varying degrees of activity. With the emergence of a consultative government and progressive society in Singapore, this paper recommends community‐driven engagement in urban redevelopment to create authentic, localized landscapes.

Renegotiating multiracialism: the grassroots integration of new migrants’ ethnic identities in Singapore

ABSTRACT Through a study of Singapore’s integration and naturalisation processes, this paper examines how the Singaporean state has negotiated the twin challenges of embracing cultural pluralism in its population while also forming a common national identity. Employing Benedict Anderson’s conception of ‘bound serialities’, it argues that the Singaporean state has developed a framework of multiracialism to imagine the Singaporean nation through three serialities or collective identities. First, the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other (CMIO) categories organise individuals into groups that have clear cultural identities. Second, the CMIO categories constitute a fixed image of the multicultural Singaporean nation. Third, being Singaporean requires an ethos of accepting the cultural differences that the CMIO structure represents. However, such a top-down imagining of the multicultural nation is increasingly challenged by the arrival of new citizens who embody alternative imaginings of their own ethnic and national identities, raising questions about the continued effectiveness of Singapore’s multiracialism.

Neoliberalism and Two Novels of Speculative Fiction from Singapore

This essay discusses two novels from Singapore—Tham Cheng-E’s Surrogate Protocol (2017) and Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper (2017)—as speculative fiction (sf), a broader term for narratives that contain science fictional or fantastic qualities but are particularly invested in socio-political questions rather than resolutely celebrating a techno-scientific future. Through extrapolation and speculation, Singaporean speculative fiction snatches truth from the jaws of reality. Because these novels rely on imaginative speculation and extrapolation rather than historical verisimilitude and authenticity, they describe and invent a world that is similar to but a few steps removed from Singapore’s status quo. Such estrangement allows the novels to create a cognitive space in which readers can assess and question this status quo and sidestep the government’s out-of-bounds or OB markers. By extrapolating from Singapore’s present, they may evade a censorious state regime because their narratives imagine possible futures rather than revisit a politically sensitive past. Surrogate Protocol and The Gatekeeper raise questions about Singapore’s ethno-racial politics and state-sponsored promotion of biomedical technology and research. They employ technoscience and myth as novums (Darko Suvin’s term) to speculate about socio-cultural structures and strictures in Singapore. Although the novels do not offer explicit blueprints for socio-cultural change, through the cognitively estranging processes of extrapolation and speculation they question accepted norms regarding racialization, biopower, and gendered identities in Singapore. The novels’ protagonists try to resist the self-optimization called for by neoliberalism’s technology of subjectivity, even if they may eventually be compromised by its technology of subjection.

Toxic effect of fear of losing out on self‐esteem: A moderated mediation model of conformity and need for cognitive closure in Singapore

Kiasu (fear of losing out, FoLO) is considered the single most defining adjective that captures Singapore identity, and it is well‐observed in other Asian cultures as well. Despite the widespread endorsement of kiasu in Singapore, there is limited empirical research on the theoretical conception of kiasu as a psychological construct. To empirically investigate kiasu, we validated the construct and measurement of the FoLO mindset in Study 1. In Study 2, we hypothesized and found a negative association between FoLO and Singaporeans’ self‐esteem, which was mediated by a higher tendency of conformity. In addition, we hypothesized and found that individuals’ need for cognitive closure (NFCC) moderated the negative link between conformity and self‐esteem such that high NFCC accelerated the negative impact of conformity on self‐esteem. Whereas FoLO is often described as a form of competitiveness, the moderated‐mediation model of FoLO and self‐esteem can be replicated with competitiveness but in an opposite direction. This demonstrated that FoLO and competitiveness are two distinct psychological constructs. Implications of FoLO in Singapore as well as in other Asian contexts are discussed.

The discursive construction of new citizen identities in Singapore

AbstractThis article investigates how new citizens reconfigure dominant indexes of citizenship to claim status as legitimate new citizens of Singapore. New citizens are expected to resolve a tension that underpins public discourses in Singapore society: while the statal narrative of multiculturalism countenances new citizens to have perceivable markers of difference, everyday discourses expect new citizens to assimilate into the ‘Singapore core’—a term used in Singapore that denotes a homogeneous understanding of what it means to be Singaporean. By adopting a metapragmatic approach, this article identifies three common indexes of citizenship that new citizens negotiate to resolve this contradiction: language, loyalty, and legacy. By reconfiguring common markers of citizenship in Singapore, new citizens are able to discursively construct a type of citizenship that they can legitimately claim and contribute to. This expands common understandings of the notion of citizenship in Singapore society. (Citizenship, language ideologies, multiculturalism, metapragmatics, Singapore)*

The divisiveness of Chinese identities in Singapore

In July 2019, the Jamestown Foundation, an American think tank, published a report accusing China of imposing a Chinese identity onto Singapore through propaganda and influence operations. In this article, I argue that the Jamestown report is factually inaccurate and is itself an influence operation aimed at engendering distrust towards China. The re-discovery of a Chinese cultural identity by some Chinese Singaporeans—from Lee Kuan Yew to Nathan Hartono—is fuelled not by China’s clandestine influence operations, but by an intrinsic desire to mend ruptures in one's cultural heritage. Historically, the Chinese in Singapore have discarded or re-adopted their Chinese cultural identities depending on the degree to which contact is kept with China. When contact with China diminishes, successive generations of Singapore Chinese inevitably cease to identify China as a cultural motherland. When contact with China resumes, the Chinese in Singapore have frequently become divided, split into those who culturally identify as Chinese and those who do not. Since the 1978 reform and opening-up of China, the restoration of contact between China and Singapore have led to a rekindling of interest amongst Chinese Singaporeans in their cultural identities. This rekindling yields three major consequences. Firstly, Chinese Singaporeans may become further divided in terms of their cultural identity, with de-Sinicised, monolingual English speakers on one extreme and re-Sinicised, cultural Chinese on the other. Secondly, successive generations of re-Sinicised Singaporeans may grow up imbibing China’s cultural exports, thereby becoming less distinct from their mainland Chinese counterparts. Thirdly, Singapore’s government will remain incentivised to continually emphasise the distinctness of the Chinese Singaporean identity from Chinese elsewhere.

Nomadland: The blurred lines between nationalistic and ethnic identities in Singapore

Nomadland: The blurred lines between nationalistic and ethnic identities in Singapore

Hierarchies of mixedness: hybridity, mixed-race racisms and belonging for Eurasians in Singapore

ABSTRACT As a mixed yet bounded racial category, Eurasian identity in Singapore presents a key case in exploring mixed-race racisms and hierarchies based around class, race and migration. Racial categorizations in postcolonial Singapore draw heavily on colonial racial hierarchies, and the shifting boundaries around Eurasianness illustrate the performative nature of mixed identities, and the politics of being recognized/misrecognized as mixed, not-mixed, or “other” within the racialized state framework. Drawing on 30 life-story interviews with individuals who self-identify as Eurasian, this paper examines racialized identities based around mixedness and explores the valuations placed on different heritages and types of mixing in order to draw out experiences of mixed- and intra-race racialization and racisms for the Eurasian community. The limits to the performance of (mixed) race are key, seen in the juxtapositions between race, mixed race and phenotype, as inflected by performed heritage, socio-economic status and state-sanctioned cultural markers.

(Un)bound: a collaborative project on transgender identity in Singapore

(Un)bound is a collaborative project about the stories of trans people living in Singapore. Through portraits, journal entries and scrapbooking, these stories reflect on experiences of struggle, re...

Post-stroke Caregiving Experience Across Different Caregiver Identities in Singapore: A Descriptive Qualitative Study

Post-stroke Caregiving Experience Across Different Caregiver Identities in Singapore: A Descriptive Qualitative Study

Managing the complexities of race: Eurasians, classification and mixed racial identities in Singapore

ABSTRACT This paper explores the structuring of Singapore’s race classification system, and how Eurasians fit into and work around the Chinese–Malay–Indian–Other (CMIO) framework in everyday life. Racial and ethnic identities and classifications play a prominent role in Singapore, a lingering legacy of colonial population management, and a quotidian part of life for Singaporeans of all backgrounds. Race in Singapore is not an abstract category for analysis, but a highly visible and externally categorised aspect of identity, with significant practical outcomes. The paper examines how Eurasians navigate racial identities over time, and what happens when the system overlooks complex identities. Drawing out how understandings of race, ethnicity and belonging inflect what it means to be Eurasian, this paper utilises a series of 30 life story interviews which illuminate how Eurasian has become a simultaneously mixed and singular form of ethnic identity. Issues of classification and mis-classification come to the fore, as well as the perception of a hierarchy of races which belong to the nation. The idea of an overarching national identity as ‘just Singaporean’ is also explored, looking at how individuals see the future of the CMIO system, and ways in which the country can move beyond race.

Inclusion, exclusion, and racial identity in Singapore's language education system

The multiethnic population of Singapore speaks a wide variety of languages, only four of which hold official status. We consider sociolinguistic issues that arise in connection with Singapore's Mother Tongue (MT) education policy, in which children are assigned a course of language study based on their racial heritage. A survey of Singaporeans from various backgrounds indicates that those of mixed and/or minority heritage do not identify strongly with their assigned MT. Respondents of Chinese heritage differ considerably in their attitudes by ethnolinguistic background; overall, they show more ambivalence towards their assigned MT than respondents of Malay and Indian heritage. Our findings reflect the legacies of Singapore's government language campaigns, as well as a growing enthusiasm among Singaporeans for languages that index distinctive regional ethnic identities.

Negotiating Muslim Malay Identity in Singapore By Rizwana Abdul Azeez

Negotiating Muslim Malay Identity in Singapore By Rizwana Abdul Azeez

Singaporean Reactions to Commemorations of Lee Kuan Yew in Tamil Nadu

When Lee Kuan Yew passed away, many of the national and even some international rituals of mourning were expected. However, what took Singapore by surprise was an outpouring of grief and memorializing in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Singaporean mass media reported that in the village of Ullikkottai and the surrounding area, families mourned the death of a leader to whom they attributed their region’s prosperity and economic development. This article uses Arnold van Gennep’s observations on rites of passage and Victor Turner’s notion of liminality to examine the public reaction to media coverage of mourning rituals in Tamil Nadu. These reports reflexively shed light on the complex relationships and histories of race, immigration, statehood, and national identity in Singapore, all brought into focus between March and September 2015.

Horsing Around Melayu : Kuda Kepang , Islamic Piety, and Identity Politics at Play in Singapore’s Malay Community

In Singapore the term Melayu refers to the Muslim descendants of pre-colonial inhabitants, Muslim immigrants from the Malay Peninsula and insular Southeast Asia and, occasionally, descendants of Muslim immigrants from India and the Hadhramaut. Thus, in the Singaporean context, ‘Malay’ encompasses a complex array of plural ethnic, regional, and linguistic identities. Kuda kepang is a hobbyhorse trance dance introduced by Javanese immigrants to Singapore, but has been localized by Singaporean Malay practitioners, and has become a unique expression of Singaporean Malay identity. Utilizing information gained through the ethnographic study of more than a dozen Singaporean kuda kepang troupes from 2011–2013, this article explores kuda kepang performance as one embodiment of Singaporean Malay identity and provides insight into how individual Singaporean Malay performers are actively transforming and refashioning the art of Singaporean kuda kepang to reflect their changing understandings of their ethnic, social, and religious identities in Singapore.

Accounts of religio-cultural identity in Singapore and Malaysia

Singapore and Malaysia shared a similar history until 1965. They continue to share a similar spread of religions, ethnicities and languages. Even though Chinese are much the largest community in Singapore, and Malays the majority group in Malaysia, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism are widely practised in both, while Malay, English, Tamil and several forms of Chinese are widely spoken – and frequently mixed with each other. To identify the range of perceptions of culture and identity in each society, discussion was observed among an ethnically-diverse focus group of Singaporeans and compared with similar discussion among a group of Malaysians. Discursive analysis was used to examine the construction of religious and ethnic identity emerging from the spoken data. The research focus was not only on the content of the discussions itself but also on the speech strategies employed by the participants. Findings suggest the existence of competing perceptions of what a multicultural society is or should be, not only across different ethnic and religious groups but also between the two countries.