an underbelly of low-skilled, low-status ‘foreign
workers’^7 who minister to the needs of the privi-
leged in residential, commercial and industrial
settings (Yeoh, et al., 2000).
As the presence of foreigners – whether
female live-in domestic workers (mainly
Filipino, Indonesian and Sri Lankan) inserted
into the sanctity of the family and privatized
home space, or male construction and manual
workers (mainly Bangladeshi, Indian, Thai and
PRC nationals) gathering to form ‘weekend
enclaves’ in public arenas – becomes increas-
ingly felt (Yeoh and Huang, 1998), it is inter-
esting that while Singapore had found it
relatively easy to forget (or at least to selectively
remember) its colonial roots in many ways,
public discourse^8 attempts to grapple with new
diasporas which have washed ashore recently
by harking back to the colonial past. For exam-
ple, against claims that foreign workers pollute
the physical and social landscape and should be
tightly controlled, some counsel a degree of
empathy, for if Singaporeans should ‘look into
the mirror of their ancestral past’, they would
remember their immigrant ‘forefathers [who]
made their way to the south seas from China
and India to seek salvation’ (The Sunday Times,
27 July 1997).
A recent furore over the banning of foreign
maids from dining in social clubs such as the
Singapore Cricket Club (once the quintessen-
tially British bastion of white privilege) and
swimming in condominium pools sparked off
charges that ‘some Singaporeans are behaving
like their former British colonial masters’ (‘Are
Singaporeans behaving like the white Raj?’, asks
a columnist,The Straits Times, 2 August 2000).
It has also been said that Singaporeans’ attitudes
towards foreigners have been expressed in three
ways (The Straits Times, 21 September 1997):
‘looking up to them’ (the colonial mentality that
the white expatriate is always right), ‘looking
down on them’ (colonial notions of superiority
and inferiority in the allocation of ‘3D’ – dirty,
dangerous and difficult – jobs to foreign manual
workers), and ‘fear of them’ (fear of their physical
presence and their ‘taking our jobs, our children’s
places in schools, and marrying our daughters’
which mirrors the colonial obsession with ‘sani-
tation’ ‘moral hygiene’ and ‘racial purity’).
In dealing with migrant others, there is some
sense in which the relationship between ‘nation’
and ‘migration’ continues to be interpreted (and
critiqued) within colonial frames of reference
drawn from Singapore’s history as the product of
overlapping diasporas. This is because, as
Aguilar (1996: 6) observed in a different context,
in scripting national history (what is popularlyknown as ‘the Singapore story’), migrants
perform a ‘reflexive and refractory function’ which
operates partly through the discourse of ‘race/
ethnicity’ (for other examples of postcolonial
migrations and identity negotiations, see Nagar,
1997; and the essays in Fincher and Jacobs,
1998). While such reflections signal a growing
awareness, on the part of some, of the need to get
past the ‘colonial’ in the conduct of contempo-
rary social life, the extent to which the nation can
succeed in crafting a truly multicultural, cos-
mopolitan social fabric depends on whether it is
able not only to reflect on deep-seated colonial
hierarchies and mentalities within society but
also to confront and defeat them. This entails not
only recognizing the marks of coloniality – its
binary categories and cartographies – in the
present, but also possessing the will to undo the
conceptual infrastructure behind such thinking
and to imagine the nature and quality of social and
political encounters between people differently.
This is no easy task. As Jacobs reminds us,
recognizing the traces of empire and the presence
of postcolonial politics may be ‘a mark of being
beyond colonialism’, but could well also signify
‘the persistent “neo-colonial” relations within the
“new” world order’(1996: 25). In the metropoli-
tan core cities of now dismantled empires such as
London, postcolonial migrations following in the
wake of the empire’s ebb coalesce into diasporic
communities which are ‘thrust together with
anxiously nostalgic ones’, giving rise to ‘a politics
of racism, domination and displacement which is
enacted, not on distant shores, but within the
very borders of the nation-home’ (1996: 24; see
also Western, 1993, on the symbolism of place
for Barbadian Londoners; Smith, 1996, on the
politics of Starbucks coffee as the ‘empire filters
back’; Rex, 1997, on migrations from postcolo-
nial societies to Britain; Driver and Gilbert,
1998, 1999, on landscape politics in London and
other post-imperial cities; Samers, 1998, on
immigrants and ethnic minorities as ‘post-
colonial subjects’ in the context of the European
Union).
The marks of colonial ideology continue to
‘underscore the definitions of “self” and “other”
that lay at the heart of spatially diverse and con-
tradictory understandings of nation, whiteness,
power, subjection, Commonwealth’ as well as
shape the ‘imagined geographies’ and ‘identity
politics’ of postcolonial diasporas (Keith and
Pile, 1993: 17). It is hence not sufficient to
recognize these marks for what they are but to
translate awareness into tactics and practice. As
Abbas argues, ‘postcoloniality begins ... when
subjects find themselves thinking and acting in a
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