Singapore’s postcolonial state formation process has combined the appeal/distress of a multiracial society with the nationalistic pride of economic development. In recent years, the city-state has witnessed a revival of Peranakan culture and history, referring to the descendants of early Chinese immigrants who integrated into indigenous societies before becoming prized mediators for British colonisers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We question how these references are strategically deployed as part of the process of postcolonial state formation and how their aesthetic representations support public discussions and debates about what defines contemporary (Chinese) Singaporean identity. By examining Peranakan representations in the television series The Little Nyonya from a Deleuzian perspective, it will be argued that Peranakan history and culture are mobilised to de-territorialise previous meanings of national ethnic markers, specifically Chineseness, and to re-territorialise a local sense of Indigeneity. In reaction to concerns over Mainlander identity, representations of Peranakan culture and history in The Little Nyonya support the indigenisation of a specific Chinese identity that is accessible to all Singaporeans, offering an aesthetic framework in which the ongoing process of negotiating between Singapore’s national self and other unfolds.

This paper was presented as talk/panel discussion, “Another Word for Silence”, organised by PARA SITE at Quarry Bay, Hong Kong on 28 June 2015. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission. The views expressed here are solely of the author. The following sections are included: The Myth of the Lazy Native, The Malay Problem — Definition, The Malay Problem — The Causes, Singapore Malays from 1950s till 1990s, The Novels, Conclusion, References.

This paper highlights the politics of mobility through investigating Singaporean-Chinese imaginaries of mobility which are tied to the racialization of mainland Chinese migrants in Singapore. Host societies imbue (im)mobility with meanings; in the case of Singapore, mobility is imagined as transience and even immorality. The myth of migrants’ transience, both in time and in space, posits them as simultaneously marginal and threatening, and is pertinent in the case of Singapore where 29% of the population is recorded as transient labour. As a state whose population growth owes more to immigration than natural increase, Singapore must maintain its mobile labour to fulfill its aspirations to keep moving forward as a mobile city. Its high-wage mobile labour also provides a pool from which Singapore sources its potential citizens, to make up for low birth-rates and to maintain an ethnic Chinese dominance in the state. As such, a substantial number of migrants including the mainland Chinese have attained permanent residence or citizenship in Singapore, to the discontent of its Singaporean-Chinese majority. Imagined as embodiments of mobility and of a lesser Chineseness, Chinese migrants are racialized as more transient than other groups of migrants and made ‘stranger than other others.’.

Text adapted with permission from John Teo, "The Peranakan’s Interconnected World — Hybridity, Diversity and Challenges" by John Teo in "A General History of the Chinese in Singapore", Kwa C. G. and Kua B. L. (eds.) World Scientific Publishing Company (2019), pp. 245–256.

In this chapter, I trace the development of my work on race and ethnicity over the course of my academic career, as a reflection in part of my biographical background. My interest in race and ethnic relations originated from my experience of the race riots in Kuala Lumpur on 13 May 1969, subsequently grounded in graduate school in New Zealand where I conducted research on the Chinese and the Māori. My early work on returning to Singapore was on Malay identity in the region, moving on later to writing about the marginalisation of Tamils as an underclass in Malaysia, and then to a broader consideration of race, class and politics in peninsular Malaysia precipitated by the general election of 2008. Since the 1990s social scientists have turned their attention to the representation of race and politics, which is reflected in my work on the politics of racialisation and Malay identity in Singapore.