Decolonization and the politics of multiculturalism

Abstract

Multicultural governance in Singapore, ubiquitously titled multiracialism by the ruling PAP, has functioned as a pillar for Singapore’s nation-building project since independence in 1965, while serving concurrently as the ideological premise for the party’s political dominance. Although others have explored at length the sociological implications of the PAP’s racialist approach toward multiculturalism, little attention has been paid to the colonial construction of racial difference and inequality in Singapore society, in particular, the emergence of a distinct anticolonial form of multiculturalism in the immediate postwar period and decolonization. This anticolonial multiculturalism articulated the local middle class’ growing dissatisfaction with the colonial color bar, a cause appropriated and championed by a fledgling PAP from 1954 before it was eventually reformulated and incorporated into its state machinery after independence. In shifting the sociological focus toward the anticolonial origins of multicultural politics, this article challenges prevailing approaches to the study of multiculturalism in Singapore. Such an exercise in turn sheds light on the amount of ideological reworking accomplished by the PAP government in its construction of what is now understood as multiculturalism.