National Identity In Singapore Research Articles

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.

种族•文化•制度：新加坡双语政策中的国家认同构建

种族•文化•制度：新加坡双语政策中的国家认同构建

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.

Desiring the Singapore story: affective attachments and national identities in Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo

In 2013, Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo/Pa ma bu zai jia became the first Singaporean film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in Singapore during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the film portrays the lives of an ordinary middle-class family and their Filipino maid, Teresa. This article explores the affective ties to the ‘Singapore Story,’ an authoritative narrative of the city-state's nation-building history and progress determining (economic) success. Drawing on Lauren Berlant's notion of ‘cruel optimism,’ I argue that the film's main characters are dangerously attached to the idea of living the Singapore story. I further contend that Teresa's migrant domestic labor, which both sustains and troubles the Singapore story, exposes for audiences issues of loss, absence and dislocation. Employing Kathleen Stewart's notion of ‘ordinary affects,' the characters' everyday interactions and bonds formed through the figure of Teresa manifest her outsider status and the undesired costs of maintaining the Singapore story, such as dysfunctional family relations and other social issues attributed to foreign domestic workers. Using affect theory to examine Singaporean cinema, this paper interrogates what constitutes Singapore's national identity by tracking the modes of affective investment in the Singapore story.

Manufacturing Authenticity: The Cultural Production of National Identities in Singapore

AbstractAccording to Prasenjit Duara, the sacredness of the nation hinges on its ‘regimes of authenticity’ where timelessness and the politics of embodiment are key to an authentic national identity. This paper looks at three different cultural impulses that have attempted to manufacture authenticity in Singapore. They are: the Malay literary movementAngkatan Sasterawan 50prior to independence; the state-sponsored Confucian ethics discourse during the 1980s; and the romanticization of the working-class ‘heartlander’ through contemporary popular culture in confrontation with the politics of global capitalism and globalization. In doing so, this paper articulates the difference between the regimes of authenticity of state elites and non-state cultural producers, as well as their ‘national imaginaries’. It concludes that the regime of authenticity, that operationalizes the representations of the working class as a diametric opposite to the logic and force of globalization, offers the most popular symbols of national identity in Singapore.

Singapore: The Politics of Inventing National Identity

This study wants to shed new light on the politics of Singapore's national identity invention. Since independence in 1965, the Singaporean government has tried to generate a sense of national identity in Singapore. While at first, the priority was on pragmatic values to promote the economic development, this changed in the late 1980s when the government became concerned with the widespread materialism within the society. As an alternative, so-called Asian values sought to provide an ideological alternative and a new basis for a stronger national identity. At the same time, average Singaporeans have developed their own unique conceptions of the city-state's national identity, which sometimes contradict the official nation-building efforts and thus constitute a subtle form of opposition. Many Singaporeans demand greater participation in the negotiation of their Singaporean identity, which demonstrates the difficulty of constructing a sustainable authoritarian civic national identity.

National identity in Singapore: Old impediments and new imperatives1

National identity in Singapore: Old impediments and new imperatives¹

K2 Children's Learning of National Identity in Singapore

In May 1991, a quasi-experimental research study was launched to investigate Singapore K2 children's learning of national identity and the effect of parental involvement in the learning process. A specially designed and pilot-tested 43-item questionnaire was used to interview a sample of 329 K2 children randomly selected from the participating education centres and kindergartens. A 4-week intervention (five 20-min lessons plus one home-based exercise each week) was implemented after the pre-test had taken place in early July 91. The same sample of children was interviewed again in mid August, after the celebration of National Day on 9 Aug 91. The post-test scores showed there was an increase of the awareness as well as fondness of Singapore as their nation among the children in the study. The research design and findings of data analyses are presented and discussed in this paper.