ABSTRACT
One of the main concerns of this book has been the varying, contradicting, and opposing notions of Asia that have become dominant and mainstream in Singapore, sometimes at different points in time but often simultaneously. The most common of these is the figuration of Asia as a geographical and cartographic entity, usually as an agglomeration of sovereign nation states and different ethnicities and cultures, which collectively constitute an empirical object; particularly as a place that is real and knowable. Alongside this perspective are also many others: Asia as the ancestral source of Singapore’s three main ethnic groups; Asia as a convenient label for Singapore’s modern but non-Western identity; Asia as a blanket term for certain types of culturalized and regionalized commodities; Asia as a place of cultural and economic resilience and therefore a place Singaporeans need to identify with; or Asia as a threatening, competitive, dangerous, and inferior place requiring circumspection in its differentiation. There are many more perspectives of Asia, but it is not the intention of this book to merely inventorize or describe them. These are only of secondary interest as compared with my primary objective in asking how these major assertions of Asia have come about and what kinds of cultural and political negotiations take place as they are being communicated and imposed. To this end, I used the term ‘Asianism’ contingently and provisionally to indicate the processes and dynamics, both deliberate and unconscious, involved in the deployment and structuring of these discrepant perspectives of Asia into the geographical imaginations of Singaporeans.
