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Educating multicultural citizens: Colonial nationalism, imperial citizenship and education in late colonial Singapore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2012

Siew-Min Sai
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Abstract

This article recounts the unusual history of a national idea in late colonial Singapore from the 1930s to the early 1950s before Singapore's attainment of partial self-government in 1955. Using two different concepts, namely ‘colonial nationalism’ and ‘imperial citizenship’, it offers a genealogy of nationalism in Singapore, one that calls into question the applicability of prevailing theories of anti-colonial nationalism to the Singapore-in-Malaya context. Focusing on colonial nationalism, the article provides a historical account of English-mediated official multiculturalism through tracking shifting British colonial priorities, ideologies of governance and challenges to its authority in Singapore. This account is rarely appreciated in Singapore today given official scripting of national history that abets particular amnesias with regards to its multicultural nationhood.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2013 , pp. 49 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2013

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References

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107 Ibid.

108 Hong Lysa offers an incisive interpretation of British attempts to reform Chinese-medium education in connection with the rise of the student movement in the system and its challenge to Chinese business leaders in the early 1950s. See Lysa, Hong, ‘Politics of the Chinese-speaking communities in Singapore in the 1950s: The shaping of mass politics’, in The May 13 generation, pp. 57–102Google Scholar.

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117 This is the title of ch. 1 in Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments.