History and Politics

An analysis of Singapore’s history textbooks between 1965 and 2000 reveals two main developments in official presentations of race; namely, the consolidation of an essentialized notion of ‘race’ as the conflation of ethnicity, culture, language, and place, as well as a retrospective reading of independent Singapore’s official system of racial classification into its colonial history. Over the same period, curriculum planning has come under increasing centralization by state authorities, in conjunction with shifting official perceptions of the role of history education in national identity formation. 

This chapter explores both of these trends by examining, in turn, the periods 1965-1980, 1980-1990, and 1990-2000. It discusses how pedagogical tools like caricatures, photographic captions, quiz-style questions, mnemonics, and carefully selected source material are used to convey particular views of race, and prompt students to engage with, and internalize, a particular narrative of race in the nation’s history. It also discusses how political imperatives of each period have influenced treatments of race in the history curricula through the mechanisms of centralized curricular planning. It argues that both the consolidation of the racial narrative, and the centralization of the curriculum, must be seen in light of how race is construed as a threat to sovereignty and stability in multiracial Singapore.

In closing, the chapter discusses more recent developments in Singapore’s history curriculum, and assesses whether the use of history textbooks to promote a particular narrative of race will have the same effectiveness today. It suggests that pressures from both within and outside the educational bureaucracy can lead to changes in the dominant narrative of race in Singapore’s textbooks.

This book chapter appears in an edited volume:
Pia M. Joliffe and Thomas R. Bruce, eds., 'Southeast Asian Education in Modern History: Schools, Manipulation and Contest' (Routledge, 2018).

Since 1967, National Service has been the bedrock of Singapore's defence policy and a central element in its nation-building project. Unlike most countries which implement mandatory military service, Singapore's practice of male conscription applies not only to citizens but also to a select group of non-citizens (second-generation permanent residents), creating a unique context where the traditional associations between national allegiance and military service can be reexamined. This study first traces conventional understandings of citizenship and conscription and how they have been shaped by recent global developments. I then identify three discursive frames-'relational', 'transactional', and 'aspirational'-that non-citizens adopt towards National Service, and examine how their experience reconfigures the relationship between citizenship and conscription. Finally, I discuss the agency of the state, and of the wider Singapore public, in a wider renegotiation of citizenship, and possible implications for policymaking and future research.

In February 2017, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a damning report of human rights abuses perpetrated against the Rohingya. The report was based on interviews with Rohingya fleeing from Myanmar since 9 October 2016, with research continuing up to January 2017. Many recounted personal experiences of violence and physical, life-threatening harm. The report received some attention among humanitarian agencies (many of which have been banned from accessing Rakhine state) but was largely ignored by the international press. Headlines that week focused on the Trump administration’s attempts to defend its travel ban. This poem contains fragments and modifications of the report. It is not an attempt to supplant the voices of those at the heart of the report, but—by stripping down its language—an attempt to make (and mend) our ways of reading (and hearing) their stories.

In February 2017, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a damning report of human rights abuses perpetrated against the Rohingya. The report was based on interviews with Rohingya fleeing from Myanmar since 9 October 2016, with research continuing up to January 2017. Many recounted personal experiences of violence and physical, life-threatening harm. The report received some attention among humanitarian agencies (many of which have been banned from accessing Rakhine state) but was largely ignored by the international press. Headlines that week focused on the Trump administration’s attempts to defend its travel ban. This poem contains fragments and modifications of the report. It is not an attempt to supplant the voices of those at the heart of the report, but—by stripping down its language—an attempt to make (and mend) our ways of reading (and hearing) their stories.

In engaging the popularity of “free speech” as a conservative battle cry in recent years, this article poses two questions: What particular conception of that demand does the right defend, and how should the left respond? Finding that conservatives have moved from a “negative” to a “positive” understanding of this freedom selectively applied, this article presents the consistent application of that positive understanding of free speech as a challenge to concentrations of power that conspire to privilege some speech over others. Turning to recent attempts by graduate students on North American campuses to unionize, the article attempts to ground a reading of union rights as free speech rights. Free speech is presented as a useful frame through which to think about political struggles more generally, though the article cautions against treating free speech as an invariably desirable principle.