scispace - formally typeset
Journal ArticleDOI

Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore

Selvaraj Velayutham
- 01 Apr 2004 - 
- Vol. 19, Iss: 1, pp 1-27
TLDR
This paper examined the question of national identity and belonging in Singapore and found that the government's approach to nation-building based on economic developmentalism and survivalism has created an ambivalent and tenuous relationship of mutual obligation between the individual and the nation state.
Abstract
This paper draws on research data gathered from an Internet discussion forum, e-mail survey, and newspaper report to examine the question of national identity and belonging in Singapore. It considers how Singaporean citizens relate to the kinds of discourses on national identity presented by the government and articulate their experiences and sense of belonging to the Singapore nation. It argues that the government's approach to nation-building based on economic developmentalism and survivalism has created an ambivalent and tenuous relationship of mutual obligation between the individual and the nation-state. It is therefore crucial that the basis of national identity is dislodged from the ideology of survivalism if an ethical practice of obligation/reciprocity is to emerge.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Imagining the Singapore "nation" and "identity": the role of the media and national education

TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of two state ideological apparatuses in Singapore to understand how the city-state constructs its sense of nationhood and national identity is presented, showing how Singapore uses the media to represent its impoverished national identity, and through a state-led curriculum intervention, uses National Education to remediate its lack of a national identity.
Journal ArticleDOI

Bread and Circuses: Food meets politics in the Singapore media

TL;DR: This article studied how food has been represented in the Singapore press in relation to attitudes that contribute to nation-building and found that the food-related articles usually reflected a culture of self-improvement, an ethnic-cultural element and cosmopolitan attitudes, all of which were identified as touchstones of Singapore's government-approved national identity.
Journal ArticleDOI

Democratization and Government Education Provision in East Asia

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of democracy on multiple education indicators in a time-series-cross-section dataset of eight East Asian countries/political entities were studied. And the results showed that democracy plays a progressive role in promoting education spending and school enrollment at the basic level in East Asia.
Journal ArticleDOI

Thai Semicolonial Hybridities: Bhabha and García Canclini in Dialogue on Power and Cultural Blending

TL;DR: While Siamese/Thai culture is widely recognised, both historically and today, for its pervasive syncretism, theories of hybridity have rarely been used to analyse the pat... as discussed by the authors.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Extract from White Nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society

Ghassan Hage
- 01 Jan 1999 - 
TL;DR: Ghassan Hage as discussed by the authors argues that public concern about immigration stems from the distress that white Australians feel in the face of their declining power in multicultural Australia, and draws the two phenomena together.
Book

White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society

Ghassan Hage
TL;DR: Anthropologist and social critic Ghassan Hage explores one of the most complex and troubling of modern phenomena: the desire for a white nation as mentioned in this paper. But this is not a discussion of race.
Book

Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society

Ghassan Hage
TL;DR: A brief history of white colonial paranoia and the rise of Australian fundamentalism can be found in this article, where the authors discuss the lost art of the well-administered national cuddle and the imaginary of paranoid nationalism.
Book

Modernity and its futures

TL;DR: The Enlightenment Project Revisited: Gregor McLennan as discussed by the authors, and the Question of Cultural Identity: Stuart Hall, and the Enlightenment Project revisited: Gregoryor McLennaan.