(1992; see also Kironde, 1993; Perera, 1998)
singles out the design of the capitol complex as
emblematic of the state’s desire to use spectacu-
lar and monumental means to deliver and
prescribe national identity. It is unfortunate that
in the complex postcolonial enterprise of culti-
vating 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’.^5 To take a different exam-
ple, in the context of the architectural design of
university campuses at Bandung and Jakarta,
Kusno (1998: 565) argues that the object of archi-
tectural desire in postcolonial new order Indonesia
is fundamentally split between a denial and dis-
placement 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 per-
petually contradictory and yet indissolubly inter-
twined, 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 ele-
ments of the landscape inherited from the
colonial past is particularly salient in illuminat-
ing 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 system-
atic 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 con-
cretized in the landscape. ‘Remembering’
emerged at a specific time and place in the
nation’s development, both as an inevitable con-
dition 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 mate-
rial sense, only to find a place bristling with effi-
ciency and productivity but bereft of a certain
depth of memory and history. The work of sal-
vaging and heritagizing remnant landscapes – res-
urrecting once-obsolete shophouse districts in
Chinatown, Kampong Glam and Little India as
‘heritage districts’ and ‘ethnic quarters’ (a partic-
ularly 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 Redevelop-
ment 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 over-
seeing the preservation and protection of build-
ings signifying the ‘history and memory of the
place’ (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
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