This study represents the scandal of current colonial racist ideologizing by focusing on the American
Orientalizing project in Singapore. It argues that, in the era of global capitalism and post-colonial
theory, the new colonialist epistemologies rely on collaborations between the ruling classes of the 'third
world' and 'first world' as well as a rhetoric of 'native' nationalism to contain threatening non-Western
economic success and to create 'third world' populations and governments that will not resist the
continuation of the Western/American colonizing project. Using a Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytical
theory of hegemony, of a "libidinal politics" which focuses on the role of desire in national culture, this
thesis shows that the Singapore government has used American Orientalist ideology to effect
disempowering cultural changes in the people. Examining political and literary texts, I argue that the
Singapore government quotes American notions of 'Oriental' difference to keep "dangerous Western
(liberal) influences" from 'ethnically contaminating' the nation, and that it has hegemonized an
'Asian'/'Confucianist' nationalism by hystericizing and repressing the people's desire, leading
Singaporeans to disavow their location in a post-modern world. The Orientalizing of Singapore, where
Chinese identity has been produced as a masquerade of Western culture, has also generated a crisis in
male identity, involving an inward-looking escapist cultural narcissism that blocks a positive response to
historical realities. Paradoxically, the claim to a non-Western modernity has also been used to suppress
ethnic difference by producing ethnicity as 'fetish.' The East/West discourse that emerged from the
caning of an American teenager, Michael Fay, in Singapore is used to reveal the entrapment of
Singapore's 'Oriental' national identity in American colonial desire, and to argue that the perceived East
Asian 'cultural confidence' often spoken about today overlooks the fact that such cultural certitude
accrues from the East entering into the West's fantasy scenarios and staging itself as the other's object of
desire. This thesis suggests that current 'post-colonial' claims to "ethnic, non-Western" modernisms be viewed with some skepticism as possibly involving the ventriloquistic 'passing' of Western colonial
ideology as the voice of the 'racial other.' / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/6774 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Gabrielpillai, Matilda |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 22147860 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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