Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity: The Making of a Diasporic Public Sphere in Singapore

Harper, T. N.

doi:10.1355/sj12-2e

Cited by 56 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…For more about urban citizenship in Rangoon see Osada, “Housing the Rangoon Poor: Indians, Burmese, and Town Planning in Colonial Burma,”. For more about Asian port cities see Tan, “Port Cities and Hinterlands: A Comparative Study of Singapore and Calcutta”; Frost, “Asia's Maritime Networks and the Colonial Public Sphere, 1840‐1920”; Harper, “Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity: The Making of a Diasporic Public Sphere in Singapore”. While the author is aware that there is a large body of recent work on citizenship, particularly in Asia, this article means to focus on citizenship in the context of social histories.…”

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Building Burma: Constructing Rangoon's Urban Influence on Citizenship and Nationhood

Sugarman

2016

History Compass

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While Burma has often been discussed at the margins of South and Southeast Asian historiography, contemporary scholarship has begun to construct Burma as central to wider regional and inter‐Asian histories. This essay considers how notions of nationhood and citizenship relating to Rangoon's urban environment can begin to be understood in light of recent historical work on other Asian port cities. Looking at published work on Asian cities like Bombay, Hong Kong, and Singapore, this article constructs a contextual framework from which Rangoon's role in building a Burmese identity can be analysed. Nikhil Rao's House, But No Garden on Bombay offers a productive means through which a middle‐class and commercial Burmese identity could be constructed in Rangoon's pre‐war ‘suburbs’, while Alan Smart's The Shek Kip Mei Myth on Hong Kong and Loh Kah Seng's Squatters into Citizens on Singapore provide a way of understanding the role that disaster and crisis play on forming identities of belonging and citizenship among the poorest sections of Rangoon's war torn post‐war society. These cities, along with others across the Indian Ocean world – each with a long, continuous and often separate tradition of historical inquiry – can then help begin to build an understanding of citizenship and nationhood in Burma as it relates to the construction of Rangoon's urban environment.

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Building Burma: Constructing Rangoon's Urban Influence on Citizenship and Nationhood

Sugarman

2016

History Compass

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“…Of crucial importance to this emerging sense of identity was the consolidation of an active colonial public sphere in the Straits, which matured in the 1850s. 126 The enduring role of the Grand Jury, the outspoken confidence of the Straits press and the dogged activism of the Chambers of Commerce all seemed to come into their own in that decade. The longstanding Straits defence of free trade found a new resonance with politicians in Britain, who were increasingly embracing free trade and laissez-faire ideas.…”

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The Development of British Commercial and Political Networks in the Straits Settlements 1800 to 1868: The Rise of a Colonial and Regional Economic Identity?

Webster

2010

Mod. Asian Stud.

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This paper examines the growth of the British commercial communities in the Straits Settlements in the first half of the nineteenth century. It describes how they emerged as a coherent commercial and political interest group, separate from the Indian empire, with their own network of allies and commercial partners in Britain. As such, the Straits merchants emerged as a significant political lobby in their own right. It contends that in the process, they revived earlier notions of Southeast Asia as a discrete geographical region, in which political and ethnic diversity was bridged by the flourishing of maritime commercial networks.

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“…6Harper, “Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity.” On cultural geographies, see Mandal, “Cultural Geographies of the Malay World.”…”

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confidence: 99%

Weeping Qingdao Tears Abroad: Locating Chinese Publics in Colonial Malaya, circa 1919

Leow¹

2020

Itinerario

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This article suggests that conditions of coloniality produce a sui generis public sphere, one which contains multiple, plurilingual collective audiences, rather than a single “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas), or a single “imagined community” (Anderson). By way of illustration, it locates diasporic Chinese publics in the colonial public sphere of British Malaya, and argues for a more analytically differentiated understanding of their constituent collectivities, or what it refers to as “we” publics. It analyses a Chinese-language newspaper, the Yik Khuan Poh, elaborating the different “we” publics convened within its pages, and emphasising the regional and translocal geographies of collective belonging that exist within the “transnational we,” which models of diaspora tend to overdetermine. In situating the Yik Khuan Poh in its temporal and spatial contexts in the early twentieth century, this article also raises questions about the character of colonial public spheres in an era of significant globality.

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Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity: The Making of a Diasporic Public Sphere in Singapore

Cited by 56 publications

References 24 publications

Building Burma: Constructing Rangoon's Urban Influence on Citizenship and Nationhood

Building Burma: Constructing Rangoon's Urban Influence on Citizenship and Nationhood

The Development of British Commercial and Political Networks in the Straits Settlements 1800 to 1868: The Rise of a Colonial and Regional Economic Identity?

Weeping Qingdao Tears Abroad: Locating Chinese Publics in Colonial Malaya, circa 1919

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