This thesis examines the genesis, outbreak and far-reaching effects of the first among a series of incidents of mass violence which determined the course of British colonial rule in post World War Two Singapore. I argue that the Maria Hertogh riots stemmed from British failure to address four crucial factors which shaped the Singapore Muslim community's attitudes towards the colonial regime: the influence of radical ideas, the effects of socio-economic marginalisation, press sensationalisation of the legal controversy, and the ineffectiveness of the police force. The outbreak of the riots had a negative effect on the image and role of the British colonial administration in Singapore, which jeopardised diplomatic ties between the British Empire, The Netherlands and the Muslim World. In response, the British utilised a symbiotic combination of proscription, surveillance, self-criticism, reconciliation and reform. Through these strategies, they sought to redeem their tarnished image, mitigate the negative effects of the riots, and anticipate similar outbreaks arising from racial and religious dissent. The politics, resistance, collaboration and ramifications upon minorities in Singapore arising from each of these five strategies will be brought to the fore. This thesis contributes to the wider history of colonial Southeast Asia by initiating a shift beyond the study of the causes of riots towards an examination of the wide-ranging effects and crises faced in the aftermath. Secondly, it will illuminate the linkages between the British colonial administration in Singapore and policymakers and officials in the Home Government and other outlying colonies. Thirdly, a more nuanced understanding of British management of mass violence in Southeast Asia will be provided. Fourthly, it proposes new ways of analysing forms of resistance that were employed by Southeast Asian communities in confronting colonial rule. Last of all, this study extends and refines the corpus of literature pertaining to religious minorities in colonial Southeast Asia.

The thesis explores the political dispositions lurking within the practices of vision, construed here in terms of the visible and invisible. It locates this investigation firstly, in the representational culture of colonial Singapore and secondly, in postcolonial Singaporean performances. Although the thesis takes as its point of departure conceptualizations of the practices of vision by Bhabha, Foucault, Lefebvre and Lacan, as the argument proceeds, the exploration takes its cue increasingly from the thought of Derrida. The chapters explore how the relationship to Otherness is variously effaced or enacted in practices of the visible and invisible. The thesis starts with an exploration of the practices of the visible in colonial power relations and postcolonial multiculturalism, construed here as a metaphysical sovereign political disposition, the predicates of which are the theological-political securing of the I Am Who I AM. Within this relationship to Otherness is a violent ethico-political relation to Otherness. However, in the thought of Derrida and Levinas, the relationship between 'us' and the 'Other' is the condition of possibility for both the Self and Other, for justice, responsibility, associated by an openness to the Other, including the willingness to be unsettled by the surprise of the Other-to-come. The second half of the thesis investigates the possibilities of a radical relation to the radically non-relational. Firstly, this radical relation to radical alterity is construed as encompassing a practice of the invisible, that of a poetics of the (im)possible. Secondly, this radical relation to Otherness is conceptualized as a 'writing in blindness', the counterpart of which is eschatological desire, accompanied by the 'art of the perhaps'.