Disavowing liberalism: recuperating socialist practices within global capitalism

In Liberalism Disavowed, Chua Beng Huat builds on his earlier work on Singapore as a “communitarian democracy” and analyzes three institutions that work coherently to buttress the legitimacy of the ruling People’s Action Party: first, the public housing program that requires the nationalization of land; second, the state capitalism that is profit-driven, market-oriented, professionally managed, and resistant to corruption; and third, the “state multiracialism” that governs an ethnically diverse population. Chua rejects the idea that Singapore’s success rests on authoritarianism and free-market capitalism, as much it has necessitated political repression and outward-oriented economic policies. The three institutions have roots in the Party’s socialist beginnings, shaping the Singapore system indelibly, and they are likely to sustain over generations. Singapore’s disavowal of liberalism is significant in light of the crisis of the Western liberal-democratic order and the rise of right-wing populist nationalism, as well as the political developments in East and Southeast Asia. Hence, its workings and contradictions, and the larger question of recuperating socialist practices within global capitalism, need to be critically evaluated. A salient concern is whether the critique of the liberal conception of the self also entails the avowal of an alternative conception of freedom.     

Malay(sian)’s image in Indonesian media prior to Konfrontasi era December 1962

This article presents the Malay(sian)’s image in Indonesian media in the early days of the Indonesia–Malaysia conflict at the beginning of 1960s. The dispute started when Tunku Abdul Rahman announced his plan to include Singapore, Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo into the Federation of Malaya. Yet Indonesia regarded it as the British’s neocolonialist project. Left-wing nationalists expressed their opposition to this plan in their daily, Bintang Timur, with illustrations made by Delsy Syamsumar (1935-2001). His artworks may represent how Malaysia was seen by Indonesian artists during the dispute. On the other hand, most of Syamsumar’s artworks demonstrate his sympathy with Azahari, Borneo’s local political leader, who staged the insurgence against the plan on 8 December 1962. This article intends to highlight Syamsumar’s pioneering artworks, picturing the Indonesia–Malaysia dispute published in Bintang Timur in December 1962.     

Imagining Malaya,practising multiculturalism: the Malayan consciousness of Singapore Chinese intellectuals in the 1950s

Abstract

Singapore in the 1950s had undergone a series of transitions, from 150?years of British colonial rule, followed by Japanese Occupation in the Second World War, to the anti-colonial independence movement, and presented a multifaceted, complex and active state in all social, political and cultural aspects. The Chinese intellectual circle as a community mainly comprised teachers, students, alumni, etc, of the Chinese middle schools established after the War, and intellectuals from the cultural sphere and press industry. This community played an important role in the anti-colonial resistance and movements throughout the 1950s. In the historical context of the struggle for autonomy and independence, the Chinese intellectuals in Singapore—originally as part of Malaya—were promoters and activists in the construction of the imagination of a Malayan nation, as part of the wave of post-colonial struggles and movements taking place in colonies around the world after the War. As such, how the Chinese intellectuals of that period embraced multiculturalism as a mean of practice, to participate in the imagination of a Malayan nation, is a topic worth revisiting.     

The Malay question in Indonesia

Thinking about links and fractures in political and historical thoughts about Malaya and Indonesia, one central question comes to mind: Why “ke-Melayu-an” (Malayness) did not become a national project in Indonesia? Given the facts that there have been emotional and material entanglements between Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, and that in Malaysia and Singapore, Malayan consciousness had a clear political context, it is important to revisit the notion of the Melayu identity in Indonesia. This article sheds some light on this issue, bringing language and political identity into vision. By looking at trajectories of Malay and Malayness in Indonesia, it aims to raise interest in a new methodology of studying political thoughts about national projects in Asia, starting with formulating central questions worthy of further pursuit.     

Life is not complete without critique: Chua Beng Huat as model

This essay outlines an intellectual portrait of Chua Beng Huat and offers a critical appreciation of his contributions as an academic, a scholar, and an intellectual. I highlight key biographical details: his family upbringing in Bukit Ho Swee, schooling in the Chinese and English mediums, higher education and academic experience in Canada, his return to Singapore, and serving as a sociology faculty at the National University of Singapore, which he made a home base for inter-Asia studies. I discuss his pedagogical approach, which extends to his research and public engagement. In reviewing his works, I focus on the theme of communitarianism as a basis of political legitimacy in East Asia, with housing provision in Singapore as a prime example. His project presents an alternative to Western liberal democracy taken as the universal bedrock of political modernity. I characterize it as the recuperation of the social in the face of capitalist modernity, which is conducive to atomization and corrosive of solidarity. Yet, he projects the possibilities of a more politically liberalized communitarianism. What he offers is not a set of ready answers that reconcile Marx’s “realm of necessity” and “realm of freedom,” but a lucid exposition of the tensions between the two realms under contemporary conditions.     

Cinema and history: critical reflections

Abstract

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien was invited to Singapore to talk about himself. In the speech, he focused on talking about his family background, his childhood memories, life experiences and how these experiences affected his life, and also how he made his films. Furthermore, as Taiwan had gone through many drastic political and economic changes, especially after the lifting of Martial Law, these conditions influenced Hou’s life and his films, too. That is, Hou’s films presented not only the changes in a rapidly urbanizing rural society, but also the important events of Taiwan’s history. At the end of the speech, Hou also mentioned that realizing the importance of social responsibilities, he would like to get more involved in the public sphere in order to make a difference in society.     

Heterogeneity in national identity construct: Example of Singapore using network analysis

Singapore has been undergoing a negotiation of its national identity as it celebrated its fifty years of independence. The seemingly lack of consensus on the nation’s identity has brought about much heated debates about Singapore’s governance. However, the construction of one’s definition of national identity is often shaped not by the political discourse but by what one has experienced in his or her formative years. Citizens who experienced different stages of nationhood are hence likely to develop different interpretations of what it means to be a citizen of the nation. In this study, using network analysis, we sought to examine how the definition of national identity differed between citizens who were born before Singapore’s independence, and hence experienced the early nation-building phase of the country, vis-à-vis citizens who were born after the country’s independence. 1000 native Singaporeans indicated which of the 27 identity markers were important for an immigrant to have to be accepted as a Singaporean. The analysis revealed that there were differences in the number of clusters within the identity networks of individuals born before versus after Singapore’s independence. The strength of the identity network of individuals born before independence was also stronger. Using simulated networks, we also showed how a change in endorsement of more influential markers had stronger effect on the overall identity network than a change in endorsement of less influential markers among individuals born before independence.     

Anti-communist films sponsored by the US government in Singapore and Malaya: on the New York Sound Masters Inc.

This article examines anti-Communist films made by Hollywood in Cantonese and Malay in Singapore and Malaya in the Cold War context of the “Campaign of Truth.” In the early 1950s, the United State Information Agency, an arm of the State Department, secretly commissioned and funded New York Sound Masters Inc. to produce and shoot several anti-Communist films in Singapore and Malaya. In 1953, cinemas across Malaya and Singapore screened Singapore Story and Kampong Sentosa, two Cold War products of the “Campaign of Truth.” In addition to analysing the ideology of these films, this article also combines declassified archive material from the US and Singaporean National Archives with primary materials from UK, US, Singaporean, and Malayan periodicals from the Cold War era in order to explore how these two films use Malay and Cantonese to narrate a Hollywood’s version of the Singaporean story. As these two films have been largely passed over in scholarship and the films and archives have not been regularly accessible, records of these films are absent from histories of film and television in the US, Singapore, and Malaya. This article aims to remedy this absence.     

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films: pursuing and escaping history

Abstract

This article situates Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films in the post Cold‐War global setting. It discusses two common interpretive approaches to Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films – French auteurism and ‘national allegory’ – and puts these two approaches within their historical context of Cold‐War and post Cold‐War global politics. The article places the rise of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films parallel to the rise of the mainland fifth generation of film directors, pointing out that their apparently opposite directions – Hou Hsiao‐Hsien going political in his Taiwan trilogy and the fifth generation film directors going apolitical – are part and parcel of the same phenomenon of alternative politics in its particular contexts and the reconstruction of a new identity politics. Particular attention is given to Hou’s Taiwan trilogy, Flowers of Shanghai, and Coffee Jikou.     

Trans-Singapore: some notes towards queer Asia as method

From the transsexual sex workers of Bugis Street to the self-fashioning butches of the current creative economy, trans-visibility has always been an iconic feature of Singapore’s public culture. Using three case studies that examine colonial transsexual subculture, postcolonial transgender biomedical modernity and the contemporary inter-Asian performances of tomboy boybands, this paper examines these practices of trans-embodiment to reveal their centrality to Singapore’s modernity. While the recent transgender turn in the West has resulted in trans-visibility and acceptance, this paper will critically show how the experience of trans-visibility in Singapore provides a different model to consider the narrative of progressive modernity. It concludes by gesturing to this new model – one that does not replicate Eurocentric ontology – through further demonstrating these practices as strategies for the critical paradigm of “queer Asia as method.”     

We or they? A summit,accents and South Korean stereotypes toward North Koreans

The effects of verbal accents on intergroup attitudes are well documented. This study aims to enrich our understanding by exploring how those effects vary according to the speaker's gender and the political context. We conducted two online survey experiments in which South Korean citizens were randomly exposed to speakers exhibiting one of four accent conditions – South Korean male and female accents and North Korean male and female accents – a week before and two days after the 2018 Singapore summit between North Korea and the United States, in order to test hypotheses based on literatures from political science, social psychology and evolutionary biology. The results indicate that only exposure to a North Korean male accent, not a North Korean female accent, strengthened stereotypes about North Koreans among South Koreans prior to the summit. Further, this negative effect disappeared immediately after the summit.     

China’s popular nationalism on the internet. Report on the 2005 anti‐Japan network struggles 1

Abstract

In April 2005, waves of anti‐Japan protest swept China and South Korea. In China, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in more than 40 cities to protest against Japan over its irresponsible attitude toward the history of colonial rule and war crimes of 60 years ago. Despite the protest having a strong ground and its action being generally non‐violent and peaceful, it was then severely condemned by many Western critics and media as chauvinistic and irrational, and as being manipulated by the Chinese government to legitimize its rule. Against such a notion, this essay attempts to work with China’s ‘popular nationalism’ (renmin minzu zhuyi), and considers its space as an autonomous political domain that is independent of the state nationalism. The ‘cyber‐nationalism’ (wanglu minzu zhuyi), this paper argues, not only challenges the state monopoly over domestic nationalist discursive production, but also opens up new possibilities for performing common people’s ‘public discursive right’ (gonggong huayu quanli). Far from being a homogeneous unity, the online campaign is characterized by free exchange of information and lively debate over the boycott strategy.     

Political failure and the necessity for global democracy

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the changes in creative activities of young people – especially in the alternative media – in Indonesia before and after Reformasi. It begins with the story of the dynamics of a student press, from my personal experience – which I believe is a typical form of student/youth movement in Indonesia – and how the student’s life obviously depends on the political situation, the university policy, and the dynamics of the student’s life at that particular time. Reformasi caused political change and freedom but simultaneously, and ironically, placed the student press in a state of meaninglessness, such that it was painfully forced for search for new meanings to keep it contextually relevant in the new era. I end the paper describing the latest form of the alternative media scene of Indonesian youth, whose focus is dramatically shifting from ‘big’ political issues to issues of the celebration of communities and self‐existence.     

Xu Beihong and the New China: thoughts centered on the painting At the World Peace Congress

This essay analyses a politically tinged painting by Xu Beihong (1895–1953), a representative modern Chinese painter. He composed the work in 1949, just before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, or the New China. In this article’s discussion of the perplexing work, the author attempts to unveil Xu’s understanding of revolution and of the relationship between art and politics, in relation to his difficulties in exploring and practicing art in the early Republic period (1912–1949). Based on this, the author discusses the painter’s mindset in the social and political context of the New China. She also tries to reveal that Xu’s art practices were restrained by the realities he was in – a crucial point to understanding his achievements and predicaments. As an artist who resisted the western modernism in the course of modernization, and who idealistically pursued the highest good and beauty through “realist” approaches and historical expressions, Xu’s predicaments interestingly reflect the complicated relationship between art and revolution in China’s road to modernization, and provide a foundation for further explorations into the core issues and the particularity of modern Chinese paintings.     

A Chinese in the new world: television dramas,global cities,and travels to modernity

Abstract

After having lain dormant for some 20 years during 1973 and 1991, the Singaporean film industry is experiencing a revival. Films produced since the early 1990s have been resolutely ‘local’ in their portrayals in an effort to ground this emergent cinematic modernity. Only a handful of these films have, however, received any international attention; most remain ‘too local’, ‘too colloquial’ to be exported further afield. This paper explores those visions or versions of the local presented in contemporary films from Singapore that simultaneously manufacture a brand of foreignness assimilable by international audiences. Through an overview of films from the revival period, this paper will show that the images that do travel successfully overseas are those that portray the dark side to Singapore’s road to economic modernization, the failed processes of an Asianized modernity. It is these images, representing one vision of an ‘authentic’ social reality, that is recognizable by international audiences in the context of previous successes by Asian films utilizing a shared form of (local) expression. My question is whether we can read these images as a particular kind of ‘slang’ – a vagabond expression that represents a filmic vernacular that also strategically invokes a cinematic modernity for the Singaporean film industry. This argument may extend to other (emergent) Asian cinemas that also participate in the production of this particular brand of foreignness. The paper will therefore provide some initial speculations towards the regionalization of cinema and ask whether such a move might be desirable and what its purpose might be.     

‘Of lost fathers and broken sons’: Farish Noor on the politics of love and the new thought in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper addresses the polemical and intimate writings of one of Malaysia’s leading public intellectuals, Farish Noor. Straddling secularism and Islamism, Noor’s ideas are informed by a compassion that seeks to bypass monotheism and an ethnically informed nationalism. An advocate of a multiethnic and plural society, Noor does not merely reject Islamism; rather, his thinking seeks to reconcile and transcend what he perceives as a false dichotomy between a system of reason and a system of belief. The achievement of this transcendence is a fraught one for it sometimes seems that Noor involuntarily contradicts himself. To resolve this contradiction I turn to Gille Deleuze’s work, Pure Immanence, which, I argue, provides a key in‐road into understanding the complexivity of Noor’s thought, in particular his valorization of love and his canny and novel attempts to interpret what he calls an ‘other Malaysia.’     

A national culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between (national) culture and state formation, arguing that the former is effectively a field of contestation where struggles over hegemony between various classes and social blocs are played out. Cultural nationalism has been the pre‐eminent form of nationalism in the twentieth century, particularly within the anti‐colonial and postcolonial contexts. Since this form of nationalism lends itself to moral regulation by ruling classes in a way that civic or political nationalisms do not (given its ability to produce and manipulate emotional affect) it becomes imperative to understand its relationship to power and to the project/process of state formation. This paper uses the case of postcolonial Pakistan as a lens through which to explore and analyse the complexities of this relationship during the early years of the Pakistani nation‐state. Using primary material – Constituent Assembly Debates and the texts of important intellectual debates on culture during this period – I show the different ways in which Pakistani culture was defined at this time, the politics and interests behind these various articulations, and their ultimate impact on state formation.     

“Doing” cultural studies: Chua Beng Huat on popular culture

Focusing on the relationship between Chua Beng Huat’s sociological thinking before the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project and his more recent famous works on consumption and popular culture, this essay seeks to understand how he has produced a methodology and a mode of authority that is effective for the context he inhabits in Singapore as well as resonant for scholars working elsewhere. After discussing his interest in large rather than ‘cult’ popular cultures, his emphasis on the detail of government processes as well as popular practices, his economically-grounded concept of consumption and his materialist approach to texts, I read his work on ‘nostalgia for the kampung’ as modelling an Inter-Asian way of doing Cultural Studies that helps us ask questions and develop concepts for our own local contexts.     

Anti-Communist moving images and Cold War ideology: on the Malayan Film Unit

The Malayan Film Unit (MFU), a film organization affiliated to the British colonial government, produced a large number of anti-communist films accompanied by multilingual recordings and commentaries. The ultimate goal of the MFU was to interpellate Malayan identity in order to eradicate the threat posed by communist ideology during the Cold War era. This article considers films made by the MFU alongside Cold War archival materials gathered from the UK and Singapore, and reportage on the MFU in the US, UK and local newspapers of the time. It will explore how Malayan communists and Chinese New Villages settlers were represented in semi-realistic/semi-fictional moving images during the Cold War period. This article aims to reconsider the question of whether the aim of the MFU really was to hasten the end of empire, or if it was an extension of the imperialist machinery of state in South-East Asia.