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 pres-
sures 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 partici-
pants 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 spectacu-
larity of the colonial past and the animated spec-
tacularity of the momentous present were drawn
together and fused in a collective act of remem-
brance and amnesia, which also then served as a
vehicle to envision what should lie beyond.
Such occasions where a simultaneous remem-
bering and forgetting of the colonial past are capi-
talized 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 beplayed 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 imagina-
tion – commemorating British royalty, gover-
nors, heroes and dignitaries, honouring European
city fathers and public servants, recalling linkages
with Britain and the British empire, and racializ-
ing places by separating the colonized into dis-
tinct 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 alle-
giance to the Malay as opposed to the colonial
world in the 1960s, followed closely by the intro-
duction of a multiracial logic in street naming in
accordance with the foundational racial arith-
metic 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 supe-
rior 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 land-
scape, the postcolonial strategy here is not so
much to erase the colonial imprint but to recolo-
nize with a different script, a script which desta-
bilizes 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 repre-
sent the postcolonial present. As Kusno
observes, postcolonial identity is ‘ironic’, ‘con-
tradictory’ and anxious about ‘inauthenticity’,
constituted by both a ‘relatively unproblematic
identification with the colonizer’s culture, anda
rejection of the colonizer’s culture’(1998: 550).
Architectural design provides us with further
everyday material forms to examine the ‘rela-
tionships 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 postcolo-
nial states in Asia and the Middle East, ValePOSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF PLACE AND MIGRATION 3713029-ch19.qxd 03-10-02 10:58 AM Page 371