State carnivals and the subvention of multiculturalism in Singapore¹

Abstract

Increasing attention is being paid to the specificities of Asian multiculturalism in relation to ethnic pluralism, citizenship and developmental state formation. This article examines these relationships by analysing three carnival events in colonial and postcolonial Singapore that were organized by the state to promote its official multiculturalism. Through its cultural logics of horizontal racial segmentation, cascading symbolic authority from the state to co-opted communal representatives and multi-modal ritual iteration, the 1937 King George VI coronation celebrations proffered an imperial multiculturalism based on mediating plural groups and procedural norms. Adopting the same cultural logics in the 1970s, the newly-independent nation-state revived and transformed Chingay, a creole Chinese religious procession, into an annual parade celebrating the nation as comprising racially plural groups bound together by the modern ethos of progress the developmental state exemplified. In the 2000s, Chingay has been turned into an international spectacle celebrating Singapore as a cosmopolitan global city of hybridizing multiculturalism. But indicative of new racial-class segmentation, the old nation-building pluralism is promoted by Racial Harmony Day carnivals held in suburban public housing neighborhoods. This bifurcated multiculturalism reflects the developmental state's attempts to deal with new citizenship trends as they grind against the old ethnic pluralism. While faced with the same issues globalization brings, this postcolonial multiculturalism is distinctively different from liberal multiculturalism, not least because the subvention of multiculturalism is achieved through the state appropriation of vernacular cultural practices through its carnivals.

Ethnic Disparities in Trauma Mortality Outcomes

“…Since independence in 1965, deliberate and extensive efforts on a national policy level were made to foster racial harmony among Singaporeans by the Government of Singapore. For example, there have been numerous national educational efforts in public schools, public housing quotas for the various races to ensure a healthy residential mix, and an annual Racial Harmony Day [23, 24]. Although the successes of these national policies could be measured by opinion surveys about racial tolerance and harmony, such surveys are subject to survey bias where participants enter the answer they perceive to be correct instead of what they truly think.…”

Multiculturalism on Its Head: Unexpected Boundaries and New Migration in Singapore

“…Scholars argue that CMIO multiculturalism flattens local diversity, forcing its citizens to fit idealized caricatures of what it means to be "Chinese," "Malay," and "Indian" (see Goh 2011;Chua and Kwok 2001;Purushotam 2000). Despite such criticism, Singapore society has generally accepted CMIO multiculturalism as a necessary policy for a young, diverse nation (Lai 1995).…”

Super-diversity and the bio-politics of migrant worker exclusion in Singapore

“…Building on this regime, the postcolonial government adopted the framework of 'CMIO' multiracialism as the focus of nation building (Goh 2008). Diverse social networks and cultural practices were mobilised through the racial categories to construct new institutions to express the equality of ethnic communities and forge a hybrid national identity (Goh 2011). This became politically charged when Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, in which the indigenous primacy of the Malays was championed by the ruling coalition in Kuala Lumpur.…”