Historicizing hybridity and globalization : The South Seas Society in Singapore, 1940 - 2000

Abstract

Much of the extant scholarship on Chinese identity has subscribed to the notion of the "Chinese diaspora", implicitly linking Chineseness to China. In contrast, cultural critics like Ien Ang have argued that there are many paths to understanding what it means to be Chinese. Ang has placed primacy on the idea of hybridity amidst a contemporary global age, yet this hybridity-essentialist Chineseness binary is overly theoretical as well as rigid. Instead, as Arif Dirlik and Antony Hopkins have reminded us, there is a need to historicize hybridity and globalization in order to transcend theory and understand reality. This dissertation therefore explores the history of the South Seas Society, a scholarly organization which studies the Nanyang (Southeast Asia), as a case study of a Chinese fragment in Singapore, examining in particular the influence of hybridizing and globalizing forces throughout the various stages of the Society's past from 1940 to 2000.