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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 701

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

“A little island with no natural resources”: The geographical grounding of national narratives in Singapore

Authors: Weninger, Csilla; Teo, Peter
Submitted by: Weninger, Csilla (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

This paper seeks to map the ways in which Singaporean political rhetoric of nation-building in the past four decades has been grounded in a geographical imagining of Singapore as a small island with limited natural resources. In order to do so, a data set consisting of over 300 political speeches is examined from a critical discourse analytic perspective. First, the authors investigate the trope of spatial constraints as a key element in the ‘origin myth’ of the Singaporean nation. Second, the continued evocation of this trope is examined as a discursive strategy deployed by the Singaporean government to justify its policy decisions and directions, particularly regarding human resource. The paper highlights how such powerful linkage between geography and nation produces a powerful statal narrative (Wee & Bokhorst-Heng, 2005) that shapes Singaporeans’ perceptions of and attitudes towards space and place, which in turn helps to regulate citizens’ behavior. As the authors show, such regulatory effect is achieved through constant emphasis in political rhetoric on values, which firmly cements sentiments of spatial and national belonging within a moral framework. As a second strand of analysis, the paper also examines how official rhetoric has been challenged on various online forums in the last several years as citizens offer their own interpretations of the nation-space relationship. Such counter-narratives often disrupt and deconstruct the official moral-geographical tale of the Singaporean nation and point to the internet as a site of ideological contestation among Singapore’s citizenry.

References

Wee, Lionel and Wendy Bokhorst-Heng. 2005. Language policy and nationalist ideology: Statal narratives in Singapore. Multilingua 24: 159-183.