Imagining Malaya,practising multiculturalism: the Malayan consciousness of Singapore Chinese intellectuals in the 1950s     

Sy Ren Quah 《Inter-Asia Cultural Studies》2013,14(1):96-112

Abstract

Singapore in the 1950s had undergone a series of transitions, from 150?years of British colonial rule, followed by Japanese Occupation in the Second World War, to the anti-colonial independence movement, and presented a multifaceted, complex and active state in all social, political and cultural aspects. The Chinese intellectual circle as a community mainly comprised teachers, students, alumni, etc, of the Chinese middle schools established after the War, and intellectuals from the cultural sphere and press industry. This community played an important role in the anti-colonial resistance and movements throughout the 1950s. In the historical context of the struggle for autonomy and independence, the Chinese intellectuals in Singapore—originally as part of Malaya—were promoters and activists in the construction of the imagination of a Malayan nation, as part of the wave of post-colonial struggles and movements taking place in colonies around the world after the War. As such, how the Chinese intellectuals of that period embraced multiculturalism as a mean of practice, to participate in the imagination of a Malayan nation, is a topic worth revisiting.  相似文献   

The cosmopolitan city and its Other: the ethnicizing of the Australian suburb     

Graeme Turner 《Inter-Asia Cultural Studies》2013,14(4):568-582

Abstract

In this article I argue that there has been a significant cultural change in the meanings attached to two specific sites in the Australian cultural imaginary—the city and the suburb. I see this change as the product of opposing versions of multicultural Australia. In several Australian cities, particularly Sydney, although the combination of multiculturalism and economic globalization has helped to create increasingly cosmopolitan inner city suburbs, it has also contributed to the development of an antithetical but perhaps more politically significant version of the middle or outer suburb. This new version of the suburb is defined by minority ethnic or racial identities; it is increasingly represented as criminalized; and its development runs against the grain of the traditional conception of the suburb in the Australian national imaginary, as well as the globalizing rhetoric endorsing a cosmopolitanizing transnational citizenship. The context for the discussion is given particular force by the series of ‘race riots’ which occurred in the Sydney beach suburb of Cronulla in December, 2005. These events raised serious concerns about the fate of multiculturalism in Australia and highlighted the tensions that lie beneath what is often regarded as a successful set of social policies.  相似文献