ABSTRACT

This essay seeks to link two cultural phenomena which might seem to bear little relationship to each other: contemporary and historical ‘racial formation’ (Omi and Winant 2002: 124-5) both as a mode of governance and a common-sense feature of everyday life in Singapore, and English-language literary production in the city-state from the nineteenth century onwards. Forms of racial governmentality have been a key element of all successive state apparatuses in Singapore since 1819, from the laissez-faire ‘plural society’ of early colonialism (Furnivall 1948: 304), through the very different developmental projects of late colonial and early national state formation, to Asian values discourse and its successors in the last two decades. Racial governmentality has sought to mould and indeed manufacture ethnicities for pragmatically expressed reasons of state: a fear of inter-communal violence, or the possibility of deculturation. Literature in English in Singapore has, it seems, had little to say about this. For much of Singapore’s history, it has been written by a small elite, and many commentators have noted that through an ideology of humanism, it has been divorced from the political realm and relegated to the sphere of the private and personal (Lim 1989: 524). Worse still, it has at times been seen as bearing the imprint of past or prospective colonialisms. Edwin Thumboo (1978: para. 2), writing in 1978, noted that Singapore writing before 1950 had been marginal because its writers were ‘appendages of metropolitan traditions’ from elsewhere; in this, he followed a broader tradition of cultural critique which saw colonial literatures in English as representing the donning of ‘masks of conquest’ (Viswanathan 1989) or an acceptance of mental colonization (Ngu˜gi˜ 1986). The moment when Singaporean literary production in English might speak usefully of national issues, Thumboo (1978: para. 17) felt, was rapidly passing: much contemporary writing was afflicted with a ‘creeping internationalism of idiom’, in which contemplation of an ‘inner life [was] secured through the apparent exclusion of the larger issues which surround it’. In this view, one form of colonialism was in the process of being replaced by a more sinister neo-colonial order enabled by the processes of globalization.