{"id":19740,"date":"2012-01-11T16:45:43","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T16:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19740"},"modified":"2014-10-05T20:37:37","modified_gmt":"2014-10-05T20:37:37","slug":"multiplicity-within-singularity-racial-categorization-and-recognizing-%e2%80%9cmixed-race%e2%80%9d-in-singapore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19740","title":{"rendered":"Multiplicity within Singularity: Racial Categorization and Recognizing \u201cMixed Race\u201d in Singapore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Multiplicity within Singularity: Racial Categorization and Recognizing \u201cMixed Race\u201d in Singapore<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs<\/a>
\nVolume 30, Number 3<\/a> (2011)
\npages 95-131
\nISSN: 1868-4882 (online), ISSN: 1868-1034<\/p>\n

Zarine L. Rocha<\/a><\/strong>, Research Scholar
\nDepartment of Sociology
\nNational University of Singapore<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cRace\u201d and racial categories play a significant role in everyday life and state organization in Singapore<\/a>. While multiplicity and diversity are important characteristics of Singaporean society, Singapore\u2019s multiracial ideology is firmly based on separate, racialized groups, leaving little room for racial projects reflecting more complex identifications. This article explores national narratives of race, culture and belonging as they have developed over time, used as a tool for the state, and re-emerging in discourses of hybridity and \u201cdouble-barrelled\u201d racial identifications. Multiracialism, as a maintained structural feature of Singaporean society, is both challenged and reinforced by new understandings of hybridity and older conceptions of what it means to be \u201cmixed race\u201d in a (post-)colonial society. Tracing the temporal thread of racial categorization through a lens of mixedness, this article places the Singaporean case within emerging work on hybridity and recognition of \u201cmixed race\u201d. It illustrates how state-led understandings of race and \u201cmixed race\u201d describe processes of both continuity and change, with far-reaching practical and ideological impacts.<\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cRace\u201d and racial categories have long played a significant role in everyday life and state organization in Singapore. From colonization to independent statehood, narratives of racial distinctiveness and classification underpinned Singapore\u2019s development at macro and micro levels. While multiplicity and diversity are important characteristics of contemporary Singaporean society, Singapore\u2019s multiracial ideology is firmly based on separated, racialized groups, leaving little room for more complex individual and institutional racial projects. However, hybridity and \u201cmixed race\u201d are increasingly important characteristics and identifications in Singaporean society, and in fact have historically provided an important thread linking colonial and postcolonial national identifications. This article traces the emergence of mixed identities against a background of racial structuring in Singapore, moving from colonial understandings of race towards the recent state-led efforts at recognizing hybridity: acknowledging ancestral and personal complexity within a singular racial framework…<\/p>\n

…Mixedness, Diversity and Identity<\/strong><\/p>\n

In contrast to the neat delimitations of the census, colonial Singaporean society was diverse and complicated, made up of interacting groups that blurred at the edges. The Peranakans<\/a>, otherwise known as Babas and Nonyas, or Straits Chinese, provide a good example of this complexity, as an ethnic group which traced its descent to seventeenth century Chinese migrants who married local women in Southeast Asia (Beng 1993; Stokes-Rees 2007). Characterized by Chinese and Malay influences and inflected by European and Indonesian customs, Peranakan (meaning \u201cdescendent\u201d in Malay) culture illustrated the fusion and intermingling of cultures in everyday life (Goh 2008a: 237).<\/p>\n

In keeping with the eurocentric understanding of racial hierarchy, much intermixing (particularly inter-Asian intermixing, as in this case) was left unrecorded and unremarked. It was the intermixing between Europeans and Asians that was of greater concern to the colonial authorities (Stoler 1992), reflecting the gendered and racialized bases for colonialism. Of concern was the fact that despite practical and prejudicial limitations, as in all of Europe\u2019s colonies, relationships between the colonizers and the colonized produced offspring: children of \u201cmixed race\u201d, who transgressed the ostensibly fixed racial lines demarcated by the administration (Pomfret 2009).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Individuals of mixed European and Asian descent in Singapore were known as Eurasians. Interestingly, Eurasians were among the earliest migrants to Singapore after 1819, coming from regions with an established European presence, such as Goa<\/a>, Malacca<\/a>, Macau<\/a> and Timor<\/a> (Braga-Blake 1992; Pereira 2006). Eurasians were frequently classified as European due to similarities in style of dress, custom and religion, and as such were accorded higher socio-economic status, often working in the civil service and in higher ranking jobs (Braga-Blake 1992; Pereira 1997). As greater numbers of Europeans arrived after 1869, this privileged position became more precarious (Pereira 2006). Eurasians continued to occupy an intermediate position, between the \u201clocal\u201d population and the British colonizers in terms of employment, education and socio-economic status, but a firmer line was drawn between European and Eurasian \u2013 effectively limiting social interaction and employment prospects, but maintaining a certain privilege (Braga-Blake 1992)…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Multiplicity within Singularity: Racial Categorization and Recognizing \u201cMixed Race\u201d in Singapore Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs Volume 30, Number 3 (2011) pages 95-131 ISSN: 1868-4882 (online), ISSN: 1868-1034 Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar Department of Sociology National University of Singapore \u201cRace\u201d and racial categories play a significant role in everyday life and state organization […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,33,459,8,394],"tags":[9210,3519,3551,3553,3552],"class_list":["post-19740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-census","category-history","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","tag-journal-of-current-southeast-asian-affairs","tag-singapore","tag-zarine-l-rocha","tag-zarine-lia-rocha","tag-zarine-rocha"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}