SINGAPORE

Singapore

Singapore

Introduction

A major question that is emerging from the scholarship on multiculturalism is its character in countries that were former Western colonies, affected as they are by colonial racial, legacies and globalizing migratory and cultural flows. Distinctions have rightly been made between the politics of multiculturalism in European states and settler states such as the USA, Canada and Australia, where the politics of whiteness matter more than assimilation into national cultures (Gunew 2004; Moran 2005). Critical work has also begun on the specificities of Asian multiculturalism in relation to ethnic pluralism, citizenship and developmental state formation (Hefner 2001; Kymlicka and He 2005; Goh et al. 2009).

In this article, I examine these relationships by analyzing carnival events in Singapore that organized by the state to promote its official multiculturalism. I analyze carnival events in three time periods: celebrations of King George VI's coronation in 1937, the revival of the Creole Chin gay Parade in the 1970s, and the simultaneous globalization of Chin gay as 'Asia's Mardi Gras' and invention of Racial Harmony Day carnivals in the 2000s, which I studied ethnographically in 2007, 2008 and 2009. They place Singapore in the eras of the colonial state formation, nation-state building, and globalization respectively. My aim is to work out the relationship between the carnival form and the state in constituting forms of social solidarity recognizable as 'multiculturalism'.

Discussion

The subject of carnivals is important in its own right since Mikhail Bakhtin's (1968) seminal work on Renaissance carnivals demonstrated their subversive potential. Scholars have treated recent carnivals as an emergent risky practice that transgresses and challenges capitalism and its statist order (LaCapra 1983: 291-324; Stallybrass and White 1986: 4-26; Gardiner 1992; Hardt and Negri 2004). Chesters and Welsh (2006: 34) describe the carnival as a potent set of 'repertoires of action' used by anti-globalization groups to target the 'soft symbolic underbelly' of neoliberals (also St John 2008). Others have been more ambivalent, pointing out that the history of carnivals licensed or utilized by ruling powers does not match Bakhtin's idealization (Eagleton 1981: 148; Dentith 1995: 70-9; Humphrey 2000). Rather than irregular forms, carnivals are the terrain on which politics fought and their unspeakable bodies and carnivalesque transgressions are sites on which power wrought and resisted.

My study here aligned with the latter view. The colonial and postcolonial state in Singapore organized street carnivals to materialize and legitimize official versions of multiculturalism. The continuity is not incidental, but founded upon what Apter (1999) calls the subvention of tradition, which is a theoretical expansion of the influential scholarship led by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) on the appropriation of traditional rituals to invent national cultures in Britain and the Empire. In Apter's case, the Nigerian Durbar, a colonial invention to legitimize dictatorial rule, adapted by the postcolonial state for its ideological work to imagine the Nigerian nation at different stages of its own state-building trajectory. In British Malaya, the durbar form used in the 1890s to bring Malay sultans together to legitimate British ...