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| 1 |
ID:
093964
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
At the time of independence, there were three visible racial groups among its newly constituted citizenry: an overwhelming majority of ethnic Chinese; regionally indigenous Malays and a small percentage of South Asians. The Cold War conditions precluded the island-state from being a Chinese majority state; constitutionally the new state was declared a multiracial nation. The three groups were reconstituted as Huaren, Malays and Indians. Multiracialism as official policy has become a means of governance of the People's Action Party single-party dominant government. Racial harmony as the public good provides the political and administrative space for the policing of racial boundaries, suppressing open discussion of racial issues. Meanwhile, Huaren culture has been progressively reduced to emphasis on filial piety as Confucianism writ small and an emergent Singaporean identity distances the local born Huaren from the 'foreign workers' that arrive daily from the People's Republic of China.
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| 2 |
ID:
093965
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Postmodern view of Chinese identity, with its emphasis on self-invention and culture performance, does not gel with the real difficulties of identity formation in the real social, political world. While the approach exposes the fetishism of race, it replaces race with culture still seen in totalizing, essentialzing terms.
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| 3 |
ID:
093960
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Chinese people have had a strong bond with a long continuous history that has shaped their identity as Chinese. The opening to the outside world during the last century has exposed them to different kinds of histories. Within China, the threats to their civilisation and the possibility of national history have led to many revisions of the Chinese past. Those who have lived outside China have faced alternative historical representations. How will the various experiences with history paradigms influence the very idea of being Chinese?
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| 4 |
ID:
093967
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although Singapore currently makes it impossible in the male descent line, departing from Chineseness has been a common phenomenon in Southeast Asian history. In modern nationalist times the paucity of alternative terms in Southeast Asian and European language has made the overused Cina a problematic label, impossible to detach from a very large northern neighbour and from many cultural stereotypes. Naturally many local-born and culturally hybrid citizens have sought to escape from it. The best documented mass case is the nineteenth century Philippines. Peranakan Indonesians have not found it so easy to shed this inappropriate label even though it has occasionally been wielded as a death threat. 'Outsider' status also has its uses. This presentation will be chiefly concerned with the obstacles for Peranakan in departing from Chineseness. It will argue nevertheless that many Indonesians are quietly succeeding in taking this path.
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| 5 |
ID:
093966
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper traces the evolving cultural-political regime based on the ethno-ideology of Thainess with which the Thai state controlled and contained the immigrant Chinese and their Thai-born descendants politically, and assimilated them culturally, while making use of their labour and entrepreneurship to develop Thai capitalism economically, through its absolutist, militarist and electocratic phases. It also sketches the challenges successively mounted to that regime by immigrant communists, radical democratic nationalists, and globalised capitalists, whose ethnic Chinese descent has yielded gradually over time to class and political identity in the context of successful cultural assimilation, changing international politics, growing wealth and economic crisis, coups, and political polarisation. Meanwhile, lurking in the background are the rural peasants and urban poor/marginalised population, whose majority vote and changing political loyalty may prove decisive in the outcome of the latest political contest.
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| 6 |
ID:
093961
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Starting with the 2005 Chinese Heritage Centre exhibition 'Chinese More or Less' (for which I wrote the storyboard) - specifically with that part of the exhibition that profiles diasporic Chinese exemplars of different ways of combining cosmopolitanism with Chineseness - this paper attempts to respond to questions raised by Anthony Reid, viz: whether my moving from diaspora to Shanghai comes of 'Shanghai (re)joining the diasporic sense of Chinese modernity and post-modernity'; whether 'the diaspora no longer seems quite so distinctive once China is again an open and cosmopolitan place'; and whether I am still a 'Chinese Overseas' when I live in Shanghai.
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| 7 |
ID:
093963
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Chinese Singaporeans in different eras perceive their identity as a Chinese very differently, both with regards to historical specificities and in the context of a multicultural Singapore. Through the discussion of various literary and cultural texts, this article aims to rethink how the concept and perception of Chineseness change over half a century, in relations to Singapore's multicultural society, and especially to the presence of China, ideologically, psychologically and economically.
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