THE ANTI-YELLOW CULTURE MOVEMENT, 1953-1961: MORALITY AND THE LANGUAGE OF DECOLONISING SINGAPORE

Abstract

In the heady days of postwar imperial retreat, as various factions wrestled for claims to the nation, challenges to the legitimacy of the colonial state often appeared as moral attacks. In Singapore, culture became the shared language of political activism in the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial, as different parties contended for moral leadership through the mobilizing language of being ‘anti-yellow’. This thesis traces the story of the Anti-Yellow Culture Movement through the lens of its three main protagonists – the students, the British and the People’s Action party. It argues that the movement was a discursive space that emerged at a point in Singapore’s history when a plethora of postcolonial imaginings was in competition, and the most direct strategy to capture the ground was through arguments of cultural morality.