ABSTRACT
One of the major themes communicated in this book is that in the politics of Asianism in Singapore, the location of Asia along the boundary of self and other has tended to be fluid and vacillating. In this way, Asia is sometimes structured into the self, such as when the national discourse attempts to identify itself as a reculturalized, non-Western society, and relegated to the other when the state needs to assert its rhetoric of exceptionalism or needs to construct a looming threat for the sake of national consolidation. The preceding chapters addressed this fluidity of Asianness in Singapore’s perceptions of self and other, such as its founding discourses, cultural anxieties, practices of commodification, and reinvention as a knowledge hub. There is however one critical element that has yet to be explored, and this is the physical and spatial manifestation of self and other in Singapore and how Asia is both simultaneously co-opted into while also being extricated from it.
