Brenda S A Yeoh. Handbook of Cultural Geography. Editor: Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift. Sage Publications, 2003.

For those of us writing from the margins (of one form or another), few would not have been attracted by the term ‘postcolonial’ and wondered about the promise and possibilities it may contain. This is particularly the case in the face of statements such as Hall’s that the world today is ‘incontrovertibly post-colonial’, as

colonisation so refigured the terrain that, ever since, the very idea of a world of separate identities, of isolated or separable and self-sufficient cultures and economies, has been obliged to yield to a variety of paradigms designed to capture these different but related forms of relationship, interconnection and discontinuity. (1996: 257, 252-3)

Hall goes on to claim that the ‘postcolonial’ touchstone offers ‘an alternative narrative, highlighting key conjunctures to those embedded in the classical narrative of Modernity … [a] re-narrativisation [that] displaces the “story” of capitalist modernity from its European centring to its dispersed global “peripheries” (1996: 249). Much indeed has been claimed for the power of the postcolonial critique in cutting right through to the very terms by which knowledge is constructed and the world mapped. As Anthony King argues,

Compared to other representations of the contemporary global human condition, postcolonial studies may be said to restore history and colonialism into presentist theories of globalization, and contest representations of the contemporary world in terms of Eurocentric notions of postmodernism. (1999: 99)

Such is what Jacobs calls the ‘fantastic optimism of the “post” in postcolonialism’ (1996: 24). Yet its value and impact as a critical and emancipatory discourse within geography and beyond cannot be taken for granted. Critics have already alerted us to the dangers. Drawing on his work on nationalism and postcolonial identity in Sri Lanka, Perera (1998: 6) warns that just as the application of the category ‘precolonial’ to societies prior to their incorporation into European political and economic systems tends to fix the ‘colonial’ as the main point of reference, so adding the prefix ‘post-’ may also impose ‘the continuity of foreign histories’ and ‘subordinate indigenous histories’. Reflecting on the techniques of subjugation and violence applied by ‘pro-Indonesia militias’ in the recent annexation of East Timor, Kusno concludes that ‘Behind the postcolonial [present] can lurk the spectre of a future more sinister than the colonial past itself (2000: xii). Critics have thus argued that not only is postcolonial discourse out of touch with post-colonial realities, it may itself serve to mask and at the same time perpetuate the presence of a Eurocentric pall over current efforts at (re-)-constituting the world in discursive and material terms. As Sidaway points out, ‘any postcolonial geography must realize within itself its own impossibility, given that geography is inescapably marked (both philosophically and institutionally) by its location and development as a western-colonial science’ (2000: 593).

Would it then be possible to steer between the seduction of optimistic claims as to postcoloniality’s ‘possibilities’ and the disabling gridlock of critiques as to its ‘impossibilities’? I shall argue that starting places leading to possible paths may be found by taking on board the view that the ‘postcolonial’ is not a totalizing or monolithic discourse representing one half of any simple west/ non-west bifurcation of the world, but in fact a highly mobile, contestatory and still developing arena where opportunities for insight may be gained at multiple sites. Its redemptive features as a means of resisting colonialisms of all forms and its manipulative aspects as a vehicle for colonialism to reproduce itself cannot be totally disentangled, but I argue that the way forward is not to accept the paralysis of such an impasse but to take advantage of the ‘shape-shifting instability of the concept’ (Hau, 2000: 78) and to strategically and critically mine this variegated field for insights and impulses. It is by encouraging multiple points of entry into the discourse and the presence and participation of a wider range of subjects, scholars and activists that one may hope to chisel at the edges of this epistemological empire and carry the ground away from the current western-centric loci (both philosophical and institutional, as Sidaway observes) of its imagining. This is no easy task, and perhaps the most difficult questions revolve around how we may move beyond ‘iconoclastic talk about “domination” of alien models and theories’ to the construction of alternative frameworks and metatheories which reflect ‘indigenous’ world-views and experiences (Atal, 1981: 195). Shamsul points out that ‘to have an academic discourse beyond “orientalism” and “occidentalism” is rather a tall order as long as we cannot break away from and become totally independent of colonial knowledge’ (1998: 2). Not only did the colonial project invade and conquer territorial space, it has systematically colonized indigenous epistemological spaces, reconstituting and replacing these using a wide corpus of colonial knowledge, policies and frameworks. With decolonization, ex-colonies have regained (sometimes partial) political territory, but seldom the epistemological space. Yet, surely the more constructive response here is not to reject western discourse as tainted and hence disabling, but to use ‘its very own tools of critical theory … not only to dismantle colonialism’s signifying system but also to articulate the silences of the native by liberating the suppressed in discourse’ (Zawiah Yahya, quoted in Alatas, 1995: 131).

I would also argue that these endeavours are more likely to achieve transformative effect if postcolonialism is interrogated as part of a serious and sustained engagement with ‘material practices, actual spaces and real politics’ (Barnett, 1997: 137). As King notes, ‘postcolonialism (or postcoloniality) exists as a concept for representing particular conditions in the contemporary world, especially (though not only) in regard to issues of identity, meaning, and consciousness and, not least, the material forms and spaces in which they are embodied’ (1999: 101). Yet, many discussions of ‘the making of postcolonial subjects as hybrid, contradictory, and ambivalent’ tend to be ‘noticeably unmediated by the material properties of space’ (Kusno, 2000: 211). If the main limits of postcolonial theories lie in their mistaken ‘attempt to transcend in rhetoric what has not been transcended in substance’ (Ryan, 1994: 82), then an important starting place in overcoming some of these limitations would be to dissect postcoloniality as threaded through real spaces, built forms and the material substance of everyday biospheres in the postcolonial world. By overlaying and etching the complex contours of the postcolonial debate onto a specific space with both material and imagined dimensions, geographers in particular are well positioned to grasp the substance along with the critique and avoid the navel-gazing tendencies of certain forms of postcolonial studies, which seem reluctant to go much further beyond theorizing ‘the meaning of the hyphen in post-coloniality’. My purpose then is to begin exploring the postcolonial terrain on foot, so to speak, not attempting to cover a lot of ground as expected in an extensive survey, but recognizing my own inescapable location in material space. I begin with postcolonial Singapore before ranging further afield where other paths may be discerned. In these explorations, I will first turn to the way postcolonial nations search for ‘groundings’ to locate, define and solidify a sense of identity before moving on to consider the way these nations cope with ‘unmoorings’—fluidities and mobilities which not only transgress the borders of the nation, but further trouble the inviolability of its body.

Postcolonial Memory and the Localizing of Identity

Singapore, in many ways, is the product of forgettings. Singapore occurred, and continues to sustain itself, as a result of recurrent acts of forgettings. Forgetting is the condition of Singapore. (Devan, 1999: 22)

The engagement with memory and identity in postcolonial nations such as Singapore is fraught terrain, woven around the politics of inclusion and exclusion, of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ where both acts are not just accidental or ignorant acts but more often than not ‘structural necessities’ (1999: 22). For its people, knowing what to remember (and what to forget) in order to arrive at a sense of self-identity is a complicated business involving being able to trace a line of sight through multiple prisms refracting the nation’s history in different directions, for Singaporeans ‘inherit [an] Asian identity through Westernization (which for some is almost identical as modernization) via colonialism’ (Koh, 1999: 46). And because the past contains radical breaks and unresolved contradictions compressed within a relatively short space and time, it is prone to simplifications by those such as the agencies of the state which are ‘tempted to confer upon it an ideal history, a proper genealogy’ (Devan, 1999: 33) for the sake of building the nation and producing the ‘ideal of the post-colonial citizen’ (Srivastava, 1996: 406).

In this endeavour, the power of the landscape as ‘a vast repository out of which symbols of … ideology can be fashioned’ (Duncan, 1985: 182) may be harnessed. Amidst the enormous pressures of forging an independent nation out of the raging political and socio-economic fires of the 1960s, Singapore’s postcolonial political leaders did not forget to draw on the power of landscape spectacle when confronted with ‘a complex, multiracial community with little sense of common history, with a group purpose which is yet to be properly articulated … in the process of rapid transition towards a destiny which we do not know yet’ (Goh Keng Swee, then Minister of the Interior and Defence, quoted in Chew, 1991: 363). In 1966, Singapore’s first National Day Parade (enacted every year since) was staged at the Padang, an expanse of green flanked by British municipal and religious institutions and which served as both cricket and ceremonial ground (a quintessentially British combination) in the colonial days. As the sea of green vanished beneath the feet of thousands of parade participants arranged in serried ranks and wielding military and musical instruments, flags and other paraphernalia, synchronized displays of parade motifs asserting the joys of living and working together as ‘one people, one nation and one Singapore’ appropriated what was once the locus of British colonial power and civic pride and reinscribed it with equally ostentatious meanings congruent with nationhood (Kong and Yeoh, 1997; Rajah, 1999). The architectural spectacularity of the colonial past and the animated spectacularity of the momentous present were drawn together and fused in a collective act of remembrance and amnesia, which also then served as a vehicle to envision what should lie beyond.

Such occasions where a simultaneous remembering and forgetting of the colonial past are capitalized upon to prescribe a new beginning and a utopian future are replicated in a variegated number of ways in the postcolonial struggle for identity. Beyond the cultural politics of creating landscapes of spectacle, struggles as to how to deal with ‘not-so-hidden histories and not-so-absent geographies of imperialism’ also continue to be played out in everyday postcolonial landscapes. In Singapore, this is clearly seen, for example, in the strategies to rewrite the colonial toponymic text and inscribe nationhood: presented on independence with an official network of street and place names rooted in the colonial imagination—commemorating British royalty, governors, heroes and dignitaries, honouring European city fathers and public servants, recalling linkages with Britain and the British empire, and racializing places by separating the colonized into distinct segregated districts by race—the new architects of the Singapore landscape soon got to work experimenting with new significations better tailored to project the new order. ‘Old colonial nuances, British snob names of towns and royalty’ were deliberately avoided, and a slew of ‘rewritings’ transformed the landscape: first, a Malayanizing to signal Singapore’s allegiance to the Malay as opposed to the colonial world in the 1960s, followed closely by the introduction of a multiracial logic in street naming in accordance with the foundational racial arithmetic of the new nation, and moving on in the 1970s and 1980s to the use of ‘mathematical naming’, ‘pinyinization’ (a Mandarin system of romanizing Chinese characters seen to be superior to the haphazard translations from Chinese dialect bequeathed by the British) and ‘bilingual-ism’ to give the toponymically Anglicized city an ‘Asian feel’ (Yeoh, 1996a).

In the symbolic (re)production of the landscape, the postcolonial strategy here is not so much to erase the colonial imprint but to recolonize with a different script, a script which destabilizes the logic of colonial imaginings by offering its own accents in counterpoint to what was there before. Clearly, postcolonial strivings for a new identity do not completely banish the colonial past but involve the selective retrieval and appropriation of indigenous and colonial cultures to produce appropriate forms to represent the postcolonial present. As Kusno observes, postcolonial identity is ‘ironic’, ‘contradictory’ and anxious about ‘inauthenticity’, constituted by both a ‘relatively unproblematic identification with the colonizer’s culture, and a rejection of the colonizer’s culture (1998: 550).

Architectural design provides us with further everyday material forms to examine the ‘relationships between the memorialisation of the past and the spatialisation of public memory’ (Johnson, 1995: 63; see also Johnson 1996; 1999) in the postcolonial context of nation-building. For example, in his comparative analysis of the design of parliamentary complexes in postcolonial states in Asia and the Middle East, Vale (1992; see also Kironde, 1993; Perera, 1998) singles out the design of the capitol complex as emblematic of the state’s desire to use spectacular and monumental means to deliver and prescribe national identity. It is unfortunate that in the complex postcolonial enterprise of cultivating national identity, the balance between ‘cultural self-determination and international modernity’ in the design of these monumental forms was not always particularly imaginative, sometimes reduced to a question of how to be ‘Western without depending on the West’ (Vale, 1992: 53, quoting Edward Shils), or, even worse, resulting in what one Arab intellectual dismisses as ‘slums of the West’. To take a different example, in the context of the architectural design of university campuses at Bandung and Jakarta, Kusno (1998: 565) argues that the object of architectural desire in postcolonial new order Indonesia is fundamentally split between a denial and displacement of ‘colonial origins’ on the one hand, and a recitation of the coloniality of ‘Indonesian architecture’ on the other (see also Oduwaye, 1998, on the development of university campuses in postcolonial Nigeria). These two strains are perpetually contradictory and yet indissolubly intertwined, giving rise to attempts to ‘anaesthetize the pain of this contradiction … by a continuous attempt to recover and imagine [the new order’s] own “tradition”’ (Kusno, 1998: 572).

The contested ‘heritagizing’ of specific elements of the landscape inherited from the colonial past is particularly salient in illuminating the spatialized cultural politics at work in postcolonial nations. Coming back to the case of Singapore, part of the postcolonial exercise in forgetting involved making deep and thorough excisions in the landscape to remove all that is thought to be obsolete or retrogressive, and to make way for embedding ‘new’ memories appropriate to the state’s construction of the national self. If the first two decades of the nation’s development were dictated by systematic amnesia and the erasure of the past through major state-driven programmes of urban renewal and redevelopment, the next two saw a more concerted attempt to recover memory loss and in so doing fashion an appropriate genealogy which would constitute the nation’s legitimacy and which is clearly marked, signposted and concretized in the landscape. ‘Remembering’ emerged at a specific time and place in the nation’s development, both as an inevitable condition of the cycle of progress and loss and as a deliberate strategy of forging the nation’s future. Chua (1995) argues that ‘nostalgia’ and a harking back to the past—a past portrayed as a ‘foreign country’ where ‘they do things differently’ (Hartley, quoted in Lowenthal, 1985: xvi) -during the 1980s and 1990s were rooted in the wider critique of and resistance to the relentless drive towards economic development, the frenetic pace of life, high stress levels, the corruption of new-found materialism and the consequent ‘industrialization of everyday life’. The nostalgia of the nation is hence a postcolonial critique of postcolonial success—the emergence of the nation from the jaws of colonialism to have miraculously ‘arrived’ in an economic and material sense, only to find a place bristling with efficiency and productivity but bereft of a certain depth of memory and history. The work of salvaging and heritagizing remnant landscapes—resurrecting once-obsolete shophouse districts in Chinatown, Kampong Glam and Little India as ‘heritage districts’ and ‘ethnic quarters’ (a particularly colonial construct) or repackaging the civic and cultural district into heritage trails offering the best of colonial Singapore (Chang, 1997; 2000; Chang and Yeoh, 1999; Huang, et al., 1995; Yeoh and Huang 1996; Yeoh and Kong, 1994; 1996)—is symptomatic of the state’s response to such a critique. The response itself is however highly problematic, for not only does it ‘forget’ the earlier attempts at excising the colonial past to make space for creating a modern Singapore with a breakaway trajectory leading to a different future, it also appears unaware of the contradictions between the two postcolonial impulses of straining to ‘forget’ and needing to ‘remember’. Symptomatic of these tensions is the fact that the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Singapore, in charge of renewal and redevelopment of the city’s physical fabric under a ‘demolish and rebuild’ philosophy, is also the national conservation authority overseeing the preservation and protection of buildings signifying the ‘history and memory of the place’ (http://www.ura.gov.sg).

The difficulties of postcolonial remembrance and amnesia are further compounded by the fact that what constitutes ‘history’ in multiethnic postcolonial nations is a major minefield. This is because ‘the [postcolonial] text speaks with a multitude of languages’ (Cleary, 1997: 28), mixing colonial idioms with the postcolonial in indissoluble ways, making it difficult to sieve out what belongs to the pure, non-colonized ‘self, and troubling attempts to either break from, or draw on, the colonial past as ‘other’. This is also because drawn into the postcolonial crucible are a multitude of different interest groups and alliances alongside the postcolonial state and commercial ventures, each staking a different claim on the nation’s heritage, and a right over what it should not ‘forget to remember’, as well as what it should ‘remember to forget’ (Devan, 1999: 22). Hindsight is hence perpetually unstable, shifting with each perspective. What is valorized and mapped as ‘heritage’ in official and popular imaginative geographies becomes locked into questions such as who controls (and benefits from) the whole process of transforming ‘history’ into tangible presences (and hence also absences) on the landscape and for what purposes (such as group identity formation, nationalism or tourism) (Bonnemaison, 1997; Chang, 1997; Jones and Bromley, 1996; Jones and Varley, 1999; Kwok et al., 1999; Parenteau et al., 1995; Shaw and Jones, 1997).

While the postcolonial state in many instances (as in Singapore: see Kong and Yeoh, 1994) has exercised heavy-handed control over the definition of what constitutes the nation’s memory and the actual work of heritagizing, other agencies, including marginal groups, have also played a part in some of these struggles over place. Even in Singapore, in responding to state-envisioned heritage landscapes, there are clearly alternative readings and resistances within the body of the postcolonial nation against such hegemonic intentions, although little expressed in confrontational style. Some have clearly found state-propelled conservation and preservation efforts superficial, with little penetrating beneath the veneer of commercialization to creatively connect with the past. As such, so-called heritage landscapes designed by state agencies have been dismissed by some as ‘a piece of kitsch … some kind of feeble confection’ (architect Tay Kheng Soon, The Straits Times, 18 February 2000) and by others as somewhat bland and disengaged from the development of a sense of national identity.

Elsewhere in the postcolonial world, the politics of what constitutes heritage continue to unfold as nations search to define their identities. In the state-designated ‘historic city’ of Melaka, for example, Portuguese Eurasians resist being excised from official accounts by their ‘chameleon-like abilities’ in repositioning their ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ within Malaysian debates about postcolonial national identity (Sarkissian, 1997). In the same city, Cartier (1993; 1997: 555) examines how place-based constructions of cultural identity and representations of state nationalism are drawn into the politics of space surrounding Bukit China, a monumental traditional Chinese burial ground, and details the protracted struggles over its transformation into a ‘nationscape, a site-specific distillation of half a millennium of Malaysian history’.

Postcolonial Migrations and the Migrancy of Identity

[T]he postcolonial [highlights] the complexities of diasporic identification which interrupt any ‘return’ to ethnically closed and ‘centred’ original histories … in the global and transcultural context … It made the ‘colonies’ themselves, and even more, large tracts of the ‘post-colonial’ world, always-already ‘diasporic’ in relation to what might be thought of as their cultures of origin. The notion that only the multicultural cities of the First World are ‘diasporaised’ is a fantasy which can only be sustained by those who have never lived in the hybridised spaces of a Third World, so-called ‘colonial’, city. (Hall, 1996: 250)

That postcolonial nations are ‘always-already diasporic’ and constitute ‘hybridised spaces’ comes as no surprise to those of us living in once-colonized cities such as Singapore. As Harper writes of the polyglot city once constituted by streams of immigrants from China, India, the Malay archipelago and other far-flung places and dominated by a small European imperial diaspora:

Singapore is a child of diaspora. Its history embodies many of the tensions of blood and belonging that the concept evokes. Singapore testifies to the difficulties of creating a modern nation-state on a model inherited from Europe in a region where history mocks the nation-state’s claims to cultural and linguistic exclusiveness. The post-colonial experience of Singapore has been dominated by the attempts of the state—an artifact of British rule—to surmount these constraints and to create a national community bounded by a common culture and a sense of place, and bonded by individual allegiance. (1997: 261)

As colonialism reached far and deep into once-localized societies, it generated a multitude of mobilities across borders, coalescing into what M.L. Pratt calls ‘contact zones’ par excellence which invoke the ‘spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’ (1992: 7). Diasporas of all hues—imperial diasporas, labour diasporas, trade diasporas, cultural diasporas among them (see Cohen, 1997, for a typology)—quickened in response to the demands of empire, criss-crossed, interlocked and produced hybridized spaces arranged in kaleidoscopic disarray. As earlier discussed, one of the primary tasks of postcolonial nation-building is to transform a motley crew of diasporic orphans, whose emotional homelands diverge from their physical locations as well as from each other, into a settled people who belonged to a single home nation in every way.

Even as postcolonial nation-building attempts to territorialize and naturalize diasporic encounters produced by colonialism and coax stable social formations out of them, the forces of globalization have thrown up further mobilities of people across borders, detaching them from the home nation and inserting them elsewhere, this time facilitated by the space-time compression of an even more interconnected globe wrought by modern transportation and communications technology. Terms such as ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’ have stirred the imagination of commentators describing the transience and ambivalence of movements across spaces today, as illustrated in John Lie’s description:

The idea of diaspora—as an unending sojourn across different lands—better captures the emerging reality of transnational networks and communities than the language of immigration and assimilation … It is no longer assumed that emigrants make a sharp break from their homelands. Rather, premigration networks, cultures, and capital remain salient. The sojourn itself is neither unidirectional nor final. Multiple, circular, and return migrations, rather than a singular great journey from one sedentary space to another, occur across transnational spaces. People’s movements, in other words, follow multifarious trajectories and sustain diverse networks. (1995: 304)

As many authors have recently argued (see, for example, Anthias, 1998; Brah, 1996; Clifford, 1997; Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1995; articles in Huang, et al., 2000), the concepts of diaspora and diasporic identities provide for a less essentialized and more historically and analytically informed framework to understand not only the large and complex range of transmigrant movements that is taking place today, but also the ability to challenge our existing conceptions of culture, place and identity as closed, fixed and unchanging.

The kaleidoscope of diasporic spaces produced under the mobilities associated with colonialism, and further subjected to the disciplining gaze of nationalism with its concerns over territoriality and the inviolability of the social body within the nation’s borders, is hence once more shaken up by globalizing forces. Not only must nations and nationalisms be problematized in the context of colonial and postcolonial experiences, as Winichakul (1994) argues in the case of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, migrations and diasporas which disrupt the nation’s ‘geo-body’ must also be understood in a similarly multifaceted context. Even as ‘colonialism’s geographies’ are already highly complex—‘overlain with other cartographies of indigenous exchange, dependency, accommodation, appropriation, and resistance’, as Anderson (2000: 384) notes—each turn of the kaleidoscope continues to fracture previous patterns and introduce new instabilities. This leads Cohen to conclude that ‘globalization and diasporization are separate phenomena with no necessary causal connection … [but] they do “go together” extraordinarily well’ (1997; 175), albeit in ways which obfuscate the ironic twists in history. As Kang notes,

It is an irony of history that Japan, the former colonial power and aggressor in Asia, has been reborn as an ‘ethnically homogenous’ [sic] nation-state, while the victims of colonialism and fascism have been sundered apart and separated. However, with globalization and the gradual breakup of the Cold War, the history and memories of the colonized peoples who have been sundered apart [and scattered around Asia] have emerged in the form of history with a small ‘h’. (2001: 137)

Identity formation and its postcolonial ‘migrancy’ have to be understood not as captive, or traced in some unilinear fashion, to colonialism, but instead constituted by a skein of tangled threads, of which the ambitions of colonial empires and the diasporas of their imperial subjects form one significant strand. Indeed if ‘roots’ always precede and are inextricably intertwined with ‘routes’, as Clifford (1997: 3) observes, then it has to be added that these ‘roots’ are intricately rhizomatic ones. Returning to the case of Japan, despite the fact that the Japanese empire was ‘once burdened with the complexities and inequalities of an ethnically and culturally mixed population’ and complicit in the creation of ‘diasporic existence’ among people of Korean descent, for example, post-war national history has attempted to reduce these complexities to ‘the history of a single ethnic identity’ played out within the geography of the four ‘home islands’, thereby forgetting the other peoples of empire (Kang, 2001: 141). It is against this history of selective remembering and forgetting, and as part of the unfolding tensions between empire/nation on the one hand and ‘diasporas’ on the other, that contemporary transnational migrations are taking place, troubling the complexly fractured but concealed history of the nation.

This is central to Vera Mackie’s (2002) analysis of the ‘spaces of difference’ formed as a result of the insertion of immigrant others into the fabric of Japanese society, once thought to be homogeneous. She argues that ‘the relationships between immigrants and their relatively privileged hosts in Japan have been shaped by a history of imperialism and colonialism and the features of the contemporary political economy of East Asia’. The enforced military prostitution of the Second World War and the colonial period (which resurfaced as the ‘comfort women’ issue in the 1990s) foreshadowed a time in the 1970s when the Japanese nation-state could still assume that embodied encounters with ‘difference’ in the form of South East Asian women could be safely displaced offshore (as played out in sex tourism and other sexualized practices of ‘gazing’ on the rest of Asia). In more recent decades, however, the state has had to confront the presence of these ‘others’ within its own boundaries. Filipino women who enter Japan through labour or marriage migration, for example, are often marked by sexualized images (Mackie, 1998; Suzuki, 2000), a construction in which Japanese immigration policy is complicit in producing, for immigrant female workers are barred from being employed as domestic workers and are limited to entering the country under the legal category of ‘entertainer’, which is often a mask for the provision of sexualized activities from singing and dancing, waitressing and hostessing, to prostitution. It is interesting to note that the sexualized body—the most ‘irreducible locus for the determination of all values, meanings, and significations’ and ‘the measure of all things’ (Harvey, 2000: 97-8; see also Law, 2000)—continues to bear the marks of coloniality even when geopolitical forms of colonization have been dismantled. Diasporic spaces ‘of the other’ are hence (re-)emerging from within the social body of the nation; these can no longer be externalized. As Iwabuchi (1998) puts it, the ‘[once-colonized] subject is already within Japan and not just “out there” ’. The politics which inhabit these spaces are double edged: while it would appear that the ‘notion of discrete territory of the nation’ and ‘the transgressive fact of migration’ are counterpoints to each other, van der Veer notes that ‘self and ‘other’, ‘transgressors’ and ‘the established’, are also ‘structurally interdependent’ and that ‘nationalism (which has its basis in the control of space or territory) needs this story of migration, the diaspora of others to establish the rootedness of the nation’ (1995: 2, 6). What is also important here is that encounters between ‘nation’ and ‘diaspora’ are understood in and against a postcolonial context ‘created through the histories which connect people in different nations’ (Mackie, 2002).

These connections between colonial and post-colonial encounters are often multifarious and ramifying. As Lisa Law (2002) notes in her discussion of transnational activism among female migrant worker advocacy groups in Hong Kong and the Philippines and the emergence of a ‘post-national, diasporic public sphere’ -transnational labour migration today propelling millions to ‘transgress national borders in search of greener pastures’—is more provisional, and ‘less decipherable in terms of clear colonial or imperial histories’. The colonial imprint is however present if not always distinct. As Keiko Yamanaka (2000) shows, while the presence of a small Nepalese transnational community within the borders of Japan creating a ‘space of difference’ may be more immediately explained by the relative prosperity of East Asian economies and chronic labour shortages in Japan’s manufacturing and construction industries, it also has its roots in a distinctive ‘culture of emigration’ and ‘remittance economy’ forged out of the longstanding British colonial tradition of designating ‘martial races’ to serve as Gurkha soldiers in the British and Indian armies. ‘Global warriors’ who used to service the needs of one historic empire have reinvented themselves as ‘global workers’ responding to the rising labour demands in another domain—Japan and other ‘tiger’ economies in Asia, including the former British colony of Hong Kong (2000: 70). While there is no need to argue that these ‘warriors’ and ‘workers’ are umbilically tied to the same or singular logic, it is useful to note that colonial and postcolonial ‘migrancies’ are indissolubly if complexly inter-meshed, sometimes with unexpected outcomes. Others such as Michael Samers (1997) trace a much more clearly delineated line connecting the ‘production of diaspora’ to colonialism and neocolonialism; the emergence of what Samers calls an ‘automobile diaspora’ centred around a Renault factory in France and comprising Algerian migrant workers is explained in terms of the erosion of pre-capitalist modes of production in Algeria by French colonialism and the subsequent expansion of the French economy in the post-war period.

As in Japan, coming to terms with ‘foreigners in our midst’ has recently become a major preoccupation in Singapore (one in every four persons within Singapore’s borders is a non-citizen), even as the city-state aspires to join the global league as a ‘cosmopolitan city’ and a crucial ‘brains service node’ for business and information industries in the new ‘knowledge-based economy’. A globalizing city does not only entail the presence of multinational corporate headquarters, transnational elites of the professional and managerial class (referred to in Singapore as ‘foreign talent’), and hi-tech, cultural and tourism industries, but has to be sustained by an underbelly of low-skilled, low-status ‘foreign workers’ who minister to the needs of the privileged in residential, commercial and industrial settings (Yeoh, et al., 2000).

As the presence of foreigners—whether female live-in domestic workers (mainly Filipino, Indonesian and Sri Lankan) inserted into the sanctity of the family and privatized home space, or male construction and manual workers (mainly Bangladeshi, Indian, Thai and PRC nationals) gathering to form ‘weekend enclaves’ in public arenas—becomes increasingly felt (Yeoh and Huang, 1998), it is interesting that while Singapore had found it relatively easy to forget (or at least to selectively remember) its colonial roots in many ways, public discourse attempts to grapple with new diasporas which have washed ashore recently by harking back to the colonial past. For example, against claims that foreign workers pollute the physical and social landscape and should be tightly controlled, some counsel a degree of empathy, for if Singaporeans should ‘look into the mirror of their ancestral past’, they would remember their immigrant ‘forefathers [who] made their way to the south seas from China and India to seek salvation’ (The Sunday Times, 27 July 1997).

A recent furore over the banning of foreign maids from dining in social clubs such as the Singapore Cricket Club (once the quintessentially British bastion of white privilege) and swimming in condominium pools sparked off charges that ‘some Singaporeans are behaving like their former British colonial masters’ (‘Are Singaporeans behaving like the white Raj?’, asks a columnist, The Straits Times, 2 August 2000). It has also been said that Singaporeans’ attitudes towards foreigners have been expressed in three ways (The Straits Times, 21 September 1997): ‘looking up to them’ (the colonial mentality that the white expatriate is always right), ‘looking down on them’ (colonial notions of superiority and inferiority in the allocation of ‘3D’—dirty, dangerous and difficult—jobs to foreign manual workers), and ‘fear of them’ (fear of their physical presence and their ‘taking our jobs, our children’s places in schools, and marrying our daughters’ which mirrors the colonial obsession with ‘sanitation’ ‘moral hygiene’ and ‘racial purity’).

In dealing with migrant others, there is some sense in which the relationship between ‘nation’ and ‘migration’ continues to be interpreted (and critiqued) within colonial frames of reference drawn from Singapore’s history as the product of overlapping diasporas. This is because, as Aguilar (1996: 6) observed in a different context, in scripting national history (what is popularly known as ‘the Singapore story’), migrants perform a ‘reflexive and refractory function’ which operates partly through the discourse of ‘race/ ethnicity’ (for other examples of postcolonial migrations and identity negotiations, see Nagar, 1997; and the essays in Fincher and Jacobs, 1998). While such reflections signal a growing awareness, on the part of some, of the need to get past the ‘colonial’ in the conduct of contemporary social life, the extent to which the nation can succeed in crafting a truly multicultural, cosmopolitan social fabric depends on whether it is able not only to reflect on deep-seated colonial hierarchies and mentalities within society but also to confront and defeat them. This entails not only recognizing the marks of coloniality—its binary categories and cartographies—in the present, but also possessing the will to undo the conceptual infrastructure behind such thinking and to imagine the nature and quality of social and political encounters between people differently.

This is no easy task. As Jacobs reminds us, recognizing the traces of empire and the presence of postcolonial politics may be ‘a mark of being beyond colonialism’, but could well also signify ‘the persistent “neo-colonial” relations within the “new” world order’ (1996: 25). In the metropolitan core cities of now dismantled empires such as London, postcolonial migrations following in the wake of the empire’s ebb coalesce into diasporic communities which are ‘thrust together with anxiously nostalgic ones’, giving rise to ‘a politics of racism, domination and displacement which is enacted, not on distant shores, but within the very borders of the nation-home’ (1996: 24; see also Western, 1993, on the symbolism of place for Barbadian Londoners; Smith, 1996, on the politics of Starbucks coffee as the ‘empire filters back’; Rex, 1997, on migrations from postcolonial societies to Britain; Driver and Gilbert, 1998, 1999, on landscape politics in London and other post-imperial cities; Samers, 1998, on immigrants and ethnic minorities as ‘post-colonial subjects’ in the context of the European Union).

The marks of colonial ideology continue to ‘underscore the definitions of “self and “other” that lay at the heart of spatially diverse and contradictory understandings of nation, whiteness, power, subjection, Commonwealth’ as well as shape the ‘imagined geographies’ and ‘identity politics’ of postcolonial diasporas (Keith and Pile, 1993: 17). It is hence not sufficient to recognize these marks for what they are but to translate awareness into tactics and practice. As Abbas argues, ‘postcoloniality begins … when subjects find themselves thinking and acting in a certain way … finding ways of operating under a set of difficult conditions that threatens to appropriate us as subjects, an appropriation that can work just as well by way of acceptance as it can by rejection’ (1997: 10).

Moving back to the ‘edge of empire’ (Jacobs, 1996) and in rethinking the in-betweenness of Australia as a place which ‘belongs to neither its Anglo-centred past nor to an assuredly post-colonial or Asian future’, Anderson (2000: 381, 383; see also Schech and Haggis, 1998, on post-colonial understandings of the ‘white self in Australia) argues for ‘historiciz[ing] the nation-state within the global relations of European modernity and colonialism, recognizing that the very concept of the “nation-state” was itself an export of Europe’. This opens the way to denaturalizing claims on the part of Anglo-derived white settlers to ownership of a ‘national’ or ‘core’ culture vis-à-vis other ‘minority’ groups conventionally categorized as ‘migrants’ and ‘indigenous’ people. Anderson goes on to contend that the politics of majority-minority status positionings are not confined within national borders but are more usefully mapped onto a broader transborder terrain to take into account ‘diaspora relationships’ (2000: 386). It should be added that as much as the nation-state, along with its material borders and metaphorical boundedness, has its genesis within European colonialism, transnational flows which criss-cross the world today are also rooted in, and inflected by, the same conditions (these flows presuppose the presence of national borders to be crossed in the first place).

The ‘postnational’ imaginary—‘imagining and feeling geopolitical connections across and beyond national borders’—that Anderson (2000: 385) advocates therefore cannot preclude, and perhaps must be heralded by, a sense of the ‘postcolonial’. It is by historicizing our understandings of ‘nation’ and ‘diaspora’, as well as the space of their encounter, within the power relations spun by colonialism that we problematize and come to grips with the simultaneous logics of nation-building and transnational flows in a globalizing world. In short, we should recognize that the localizing of identities (that nations strive after) and the migrancy of identities (that transgress the nation)—as well as the ways in which they collide, collude or contradict—are both part of the same post-colonial conundrum.