Download Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore by Daniel P.S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden, Gaik PDF

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Holden The national project: S. Rajaratnam and Wang Gungwu The Straits Chinese Magazine, we have seen, inserted itself in complex ways into the interstices of colonial power, defying retrospective attempts to place it as simply conservative or progressive. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, Englishlanguage writers in Singapore found themselves caught up in the beginnings of the progressive politics of anti-colonial nationalism, forced to negotiate the place of already-racialized communities whose boundaries had been hardened under colonialism within the nation that loomed on the political horizon.

Following perhaps the example A literary history of race 27 of Mulk Raj Anand, the stories are strongly realist: with the exception of a single humorous story, all narration is in the third person, and aims to promote an illusion of transparency between the reader and the represented events. No Tamil words are used without glossing, and the story’s characters are largely presented as types, representatives of a larger movement of history: the oppressive landlord, the labourer who suffers and bears his lot, and the young educated man who questions.

However, for a reader, the effect is similar: we are again made aware that Kwang Meng is moving further from the idealized space of the schoolroom where race does not appear to matter, into an increasingly racialized world. The trajectory of Kwang Meng’s own personal narrative moves in a complementary direction to those of his friends, from what is portrayed as the relaxed, hybrid world of schoolroom friendships into an increasingly ethnically homogeneous world. Central in this transformation is his HDB neighbour Boon Teik, a young teacher who befriends Kwang Meng and invites him to his ‘tastefully furnished’ flat which Goh’s protagonist initially finds attractive: The room was painted light green.