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Thus far, my discussion has examined how the demand for ‘progress’ in Singapore has led to industrial modernity itself becoming the metanarrative which frames the city-state’s immediate post-independence national identity. The modernity that Lee Kuan Yew and the other first-generation People’s Action Party (PAP) leaders wanted was not exactly the same as, but also not one alternative, to the advanced economies’ versions of modernity. Indeed the Anglo-American West, broadly taken as either a neutral or universal culture, could be a source for the island’s postcolonial state formation. However, the world has changed a great deal since the late 1960s and the 1970s. There has been increasing discussion since the late 1980s within cultural theory and anthropology as to whether global capitalism and its associated culture homogenise the world, or whether modernity is indigenised differently in various locales.1 Also, we understand that the very resistance to capitalist forces can revivify ‘tradition’, in the form of — one of the most-cited instances — the misnamed ‘fundamentalist’ Islam. ‘Culture’ — that which was either suppressed or denigrated in Singapore, unless it was the culture of the economy — seems that which emerges from the margins as a contestatory reaction to capitalism. We may ask, however, if the state’s relation to culture is only that of the above. The prominent issue of culture and the state in the discussion of the ‘East Asian Miracle’2 lead to a renewed interest in the state itself and to some Asian states’ cultural differences from laissez-faire capitalism in managing development.3 Singapore, of course, has been part of this issue and the debates 5 The State, Ethnic Identity and Capitalism … capitalism is continually reterritorializing with one hand what it was deterritorializing with the other. – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1984) Reterritorialisation 102 that surrounded it. Much has been made of the ‘Asian values’ identitarian discourse and debate that transpired in relation to the contentious claim, made in both the West and Asia, that there may be cultural causes for these economic successes.4 The statist experimentation with (re-)invented or ‘ethnicised’ cultural identities in the case of the Asian values experiments in Singapore, I contend, represent an ongoing complicity with global capital which fostered space via an adversarial style.5 At the very least, these experiments indicate that states are capable of managing culture as an instrument to maintain national competitiveness within global capitalism and in themselves represent a shift in the city-state’s local cultural values, as discussed in the first three chapters. Dramatic changes occurred in the PAP government’s cultural management through ethnicity from the 1970s, when the state had an ‘ethnically neutral’ policy undergirded by a rational commitment to cultural modernisation and therefore also to deterritorialisation, to the international appearance of the Asian values discourse and the 1980s re-ethnicisation of Singaporeans into hyphenated identities. It was, indeed, an attempt to reterritorialise Singapore in the name of Asian values, an action that also was enabled by an increasing distance from the colonial era, and therefore from the need to recognise and to remember the island-state’s particular relation to the British West. In the process, the PAP claimed that an Asian modernity should be able to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity that existed in the West. The changes in Singapore’s ethnic management suggest that the universalising of capitalism’s culture so as to create markets is a complex process. Slavoj Žižek has asserted that the ideal form of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which … treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people — as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and respected .… [In any case,] the strain of particular roots is the phantasmatic screen which conceals the fact that the subject[’s] … true position is the void [capitalist] universality.6 Singapore, as an offshore hub for global capital flows is able to take advantage of this ‘multiculturalism’. The semi-peripheral, postcolonial state consequently is not simply or entirely disempowered when accepting contemporary capitalist formations. This chapter will investigate these questions by examining the PAP’s reterritorialisation of Singapore into a part of a Confucian East Asia as an instance of the ongoing flexible statist management of culture, the economistic cultural logic that led to this ‘national culturalism’, as I will call it, and its impact upon the way the state managed ethnicity. [18.224.93.126] Project MUSE (2024...

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