TEXTUAL CONSTRUCTION OF A NATION: THE USE OF MERGER AND SEPARATION

Abstract

History is not a neutral body of knowledge; it is not just about what had happened in the past. For the purpose of nation-building in Singapore, the history of 'merger and separation' is used by the ruling authority to provide as 'evidence' to justify the need for the policy of multiracial ism; multiracial ism represents one of the 'founding myths' of the 'Singapore' nation. In other words, the history of 'merger and separation' is deployed for the construction of the 'Singapore' nation and its imagined community of 'Singaporeans'. In this sense, history is an ideological text. History is often presented in a narrative form, and language, being the purveyor of meanings, is the principal locus of ideology. Therefore, the history as presented in the newspapers, which conventionally regarded by readers only as a historical narrative, has to be analyzed to unveil the ideological messages. The methodology of discourse-textual analysis is used in this research to achieve the above-mentioned aim. The use of newspaper text in this research illustrates that ideology is communicated from the state to the population even through a 'mundane' medium. The newspaper therefore 'universalizes' the ideological concepts and hence it facilitates the process of transforming the ideology of multiracialism into a common sense reality for 'Singaporeans'. The acceptance and conviction of some segments of the population towards the ideology of multiracialism contributes to the process of construction of a 'Singapore' nation. In this manner, the process of constructing the nation and its imagined community will always be a two-way process, that is, between the nation-state and the population and vice-versa.