On October 22, the Jackman Humanities Institute and the UTM Collaborative Digital Research Space at the University of Toronto co-hosted a virtual seminar called, “Race and Singapore Short Cinema” on Zoom. Organizers Elizabeth Wijiaya and Leong Puiyee began the event by introducing Dr. Tan Eng Kiong, Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, who would be moderating the panel discussion. The event was separated into personal introductions from the speakers, exploring the topic of race in Singapore in the context of four featured films: Timeless (2011), Not Working Today (2014), Last Trip Home (2014), and Dadhi (2015), and followed by a brief period in which audience members could ask questions.
The personal introductions of each filmmaker were centered around their individual motivations for pursuing a career in the film industry and their interactions with the topic of race; K. Rajagopal or Raja, a prolific filmmaker who produced Timeless (2011), described how the influx of foreign workers from India in the mid-1990s conflicted with his internalized racism and anti-Indian sentiments from growing up in Singapore as a member of the minority community from Kerala. Despite not having a background in filmmaking, Raja used film as an introspective medium to facilitate telling the stories of the “Other”, a subject position that also reflected his sense of isolation within the Singaporean nation.
Similarly, Tan Shijie, who directed Not Working Today (2014), was a philosophy student at the National University of Singapore who, after completing formal training in cinema production at NYU Tisch Asia, felt compelled to make a film to show the under-represented experience of migrant workers, and in particular, exploited migrant workers whose right to fair wages or medical treatment were not protected enough from errant employers. While Shijie emphasized that his film was never explicitly created to discuss the topic of racism, he instead approaches inequality in Singapore from the lens of power. Han Fengyu also echoed this sentiment regarding the unintentional direction of his film Last Trip Home (2014) in the topic of race, but rather explores the topic of class struggle and how it informs the inequalities present in Singapore. Dr. Tan Eng Kiong also mentioned that the last filmmaker, Kirsten Tan, director of Dahdi (2015), was unable to attend the panel.
Alfian Sa’at, a renowned Singaporean playwright and poet, garnered chuckles from the speakers as he displayed text on his T-shirt reading “Crazily Unrepresented Asians”, alluding to and contrasting against the popular film Crazy Rich Asians (2018), which displays the super wealthy and privileged lives of Singaporean elite. He discussed the absence of the Indigenous Malay film community in Singapore’s cinemascape despite originally being the epicenter for Malay filmmaking; Alfian referenced Singapore’s official CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) demographic model to argue that the “M” for Malay should also stand for “Missing”. Furthermore, he explored the impact of colonialist capitalism in Singapore’s conceptions of racial categories, as the racial hierarchy of difference is tied to economic productivity, and how the structural advantages of White supremacy was effectively inherited by the Chinese elite in the local context. However, Chinese migrant workers, who are “brown bodies” outside of the mainstream conceptualization of “Chineseness”, complicate the boundaries of racial privilege. Alfian emphasized that race and class are inextricably linked, a concept that became the common thread woven into ensuing panel discussions.
Dr. Sophia Siddique, Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College, was the last panelist to give her regards, providing an overall analysis and personal reflection of the featured films. As a mixed-race person from Caucasian-Singaporean and Indian-Singaporean roots, she was never deemed to visibly embody the nation. Furthermore, she stressed the importance of recognizing how the colonial census is imprinted upon Singapore’s ethnonational categories and concepts of race. Dr. Siddique discussed the commonality of the four featured films in how they tied individuals’ lived experiences into larger societal and institutional frameworks of racism, poverty, and class. She argued that these films demonstrated that issues of such magnitudes cannot be addressed in an individual, atomized perspective which serves to absolve the Singaporean state from accountability from structural oppression and the prevailing ideology of meritocracy. The professor eloquently recounted specific details of the films to their multisensory natures, such as the primacy of touch in loving caresses or acts of physical violence on screen, or the sounds of machinery, of silence, and of work as a reminder of migrants’ labour embedded in Singapore’s infrastructure and broader racial scape. Her analysis also connected the films in their similar narrative structure of ambivalent endings that were kept open-ended, akin to the inability to resolve these broader personal, social, and institutional problems into concise and satisfying conclusions. She concluded with how these films project an ethical call to action from the spectator, and how she feels optimistic about the prospect of opening up dialogues on race and class in Singapore.
Professor Tan Eng Kiong prompted the discussion by asking how race could be addressed in the Singaporean context, referencing the current race issues of the United States to contrast against Singapore’s state-sanctioned multiculturalism. Alfian began with underscoring the use of ethnic and racial stereotypes to avoid developing a dialogue about class inequalities, and how the racial hierarchy of achievement is blamed on individual failings rather than government-led structural classism. He argued that Singapore’s supposed multiracial harmony was a guise to claim that racism does not exist since the nation never practiced racist structures of slavery, compared to the United States. The class issue in Singapore was a strong thesis throughout the event as a method of discussing race, which is a socially taboo subject, and the need to dismantle state narratives of meritocracy and the CMIO demographic model. Shijie and Raja both promoted film as a way to subtly bring people into the race-class conversation, while Fengyu and Dr. Siddique emphasized the co-mingling of racial and classist hierarchies and the futility of colour-blindness in effecting progress towards an economic and racially equitable nation. The panel concluded with audience questions directed towards specific filmmakers’ experiences in producing their films.
Kana Minju Bak is a fourth-year student majoring in Contemporary Asian Studies and Diaspora and Transnational Studies. She is an Event Reporter for Synergy: The Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies, Southeast Asia section. Her major academic interests include Asian diasporic experiences, Southeast Asian migrant labour policies and practices, and political relations in the Asia-Pacific region.
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