Time protagonists: student migrants,practices of time and cultural construction of the Singapore-educated person

This paper analyses the cultural production of the ‘educated person’ through student migrants' engagement with ideas and practices of time. In particular, it pays attention to how these young people negotiate identities and develop unique strategies to achieve personal goals of education. Drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Flaherty, I conceptualise time as both a discursive structure and cultural resource to forward two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that time is an important discourse in the ways that ideas about education and becoming educated are imagined, performed and negotiated. Second, I suggest more attention needs to be placed on time as a central facet of cultural (re)production. This study focuses on one particular student flow from Southeast Asia to Singapore as a case to illuminate the role of time in cultural production, based on research with thirty students conducted between 2010 and 2011 primarily through biographical interviews.     

Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo's Be With Me

This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city‐state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a developmental state, its pervasive influence on the public and private spaces of its citizens, and recent state‐led initiatives to nurture the arts and media sectors all make it an ideal site to examine the relations between the cinema and space. Be With Me also lends itself to spatial analysis as its mise‐en‐scène is a geography of the life course: particular parts of the city are ‘cast’ as spaces of youth, middle, and old age. We elaborate how the landscapes deployed in the film are simultaneously constituted through state policies, mise‐en‐scène, and gender/age/class considerations. In so doing we show how Khoo's vision of the city‐state has altered since his emergence as a film director in the 1990s: from an oppressed site of hyper‐modernity to a more ambivalent ‘globalised’ built environment in which marginalised or liminal urban spaces for sensuous life and hope for human connection can be experienced.     

从文化殖民的视角重读新加坡海峡华人的失根与寻根

论文从文化殖民的视角分析了新加坡海峡华人的失根、寻根与保根的文化现象,并对海峡华人知识分子掀起的以传统文化为基础的现代化改革运动进行了回顾和解读。这一段从"西化"至"再华化"、从"文化殖民"至"去文化殖民"的经历,跟新加坡独立后的西化发展,以及20、21世纪之交的华族语言文化复兴运动有许多相似之处。海峡华人知识分子复兴传统的努力自有其积极意义。他们致力推广华语和复兴儒学之举,例如提倡女权女学思想、创建女校,其贡献是深远的。     

商学教育与新加坡华人经济的近代化转型

论文以第二次世界大战前新加坡华人社会中的商学教育活动为例,梳理商学教育的发展状况,并探讨了近代海外华人经济的近代化转型问题。研究显示:在近代欧美商业冲击与中国民族主义影响下,商学教育在新加坡华人社会悄然兴起,逐渐改变传统华商家族式或学徒制的商业知识传递模式。以中小学和补习学校为主的学校商学教育与以报刊杂志、国货展览会等形式进行的社会商学教育,成为第二次世界大战前新加坡华人社会商学教育的主要新形态。商学教育不仅是当地华校新式教育发展的重要内容,也是当地华人经济近代化转型的重要组成部分。     

Exhibiting Cultures: Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Museums occupy many roles which are influenced by wider circumstances and changing conditions. This study deals with the case of Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and the manner in which it is used to promote nation building in a multi‐ethnic and relatively newly independent state. In addition, it serves a political purpose and acts as an economic resource. The Asian Civilisations Museum illustrates some of the recent trends affecting the museum sector as a whole and also the particular challenges facing such institutions in a country like Singapore with its many distinctive qualities.     

Archives and Heritage in Singapore: The Development of ‘Reflections at Bukit Chandu’, a World War II Interpretive Centre

On 15 February 2002 a new World War II interpretive centre was opened in Singapore. A colonial bungalow was redeveloped by the National Archives of Singapore to commemorate the Malay Regiment and particularly the officers and soldiers who made a heroic stand against Japanese forces in one of the last battles before the fall of Singapore. This centre, Reflections at Bukit Chandu, has significance in terms of local heritage development, public memory of war, national education initiatives, and also in relation to the changing role of archives in Singapore. This paper serves as an exploration of this heritage site and uses this as a starting point for considering public history in Singapore and importantly a new direction for the National Archives of Singapore, as it played the key role in developing this site.     

Managing Urban Ethnic Heritage: Little India in Singapore

Historic urban ethnic enclaves are complex entities that serve multiple purposes and are used in various ways by different groups. This paper deals with the case of Little India in Singapore and examines the relationships, processes and underlying dynamics that are at work and their consequences for the management of the heritage site. The enclave is shown to be a historic, commercial, leisure and residential space in which citizens, migrant workers, tourists, government agencies and private business all have a stake. Existing and planned developments, however, generate conflicts and expose fundamental tensions between pressures for change and for preservation and continuity. Particular attention is devoted to the role of tourism, which is seen to act as an instrument of both development and conservation. Conclusions have a wider applicability beyond Singapore, but the distinctive qualities of the city‐state are also highlighted.     

Trafficked Enough? Missing Bodies,Migrant Labour Exploitation,and the Classification of Trafficking Victims in Singapore

Critical geographical research has recently drawn attention to representations of vulnerable or exploited groups that articulate racist or neo‐colonial imaginations, including where these geographical imaginations are implicated in the classification and characterisation of groups for legal purposes. In the case of vulnerable groups of migrants such practices can be invoked to create distinctions that justify the socio‐spatial exclusion or containment, thus oftentimes having profound implications for real people who must manoeuvre the consequences of classification. The paper builds on this strand of inquiry by exploring the imaginaries surrounding trafficking victimhood and the implications of classification for temporary labour migrants in Singapore into “trafficked” and “non‐trafficked” categories. I argue that in the Singaporean context government interest in maintaining the current labour/migration regime is equally as significant as racist and neo‐colonial imaginations and intersect with the latter in productive ways to sort vulnerable migrants into categories of trafficked and non‐trafficked.     

Constructions of cosmopolitanism in teenage citizenship in Singapore

This study aims to uncover the geographies of places informing teenagers' understanding of cosmopolitanism and citizenship. Children and young people (CYP) in Singapore are becoming more internationally mobile and growing up in highly globalised Singapore. There are three overall arguments in this paper. First, the local is the actual place to situate studies on cosmopolitanism and that cosmopolitanism should be considered as a dimension of deterritorialised citizenship amongst CYP growing up in highly globalised nation-states. There are ‘roots and routes’ approaches to citizenship and my second argument is that the ‘routes approach’ to citizenship has ingrained cosmopolitan experiences into young people's life-worlds and is arguably the stronger approach of the two for young Singaporeans. Finally, this study demonstrates that the experiences of CYP in geographies of education [Holloway, S. L., P. Hubbard, H. Jöns, H. Pimlott-Wilson. 2010. “Geographies of Education and the Significance of Children, Youth and Families.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (5)] are credible yet neglected life-worlds that can help reconstitute frameworks for understanding cosmopolitanism and citizenship [Harvey, D. 2000. “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils.” Public Culture 12 (2)].     

退缩与进取:论新加坡华文知识分子及其角色的演变

本文先论析在特定的历史与现实情境下 ,“新加坡华文知识分子”的语义 ;再从历史发展的角度考察殖民地时代、独立建国时代和踏入二十一世纪后 ,新加坡华文知识分子的出身和特征 ,以及他们所扮演的角色如何从政治、教育和文化舞台上逐步退缩 ,而今后又将会有怎样的转变和突破