National identities are politically forged, culturally constructed, and collectively shared. Young country like Singapore provides sound evidence to prove this claim.
Three cultural impulses, Terrence Chong tells us, are relevant to manufacture authenticity in Singapore. They are 1) the Malay literary movement Angkatan Sasterawan 50 prior to independence; 2) the state-sponsored Confucian ethics discourse during the 1980s; and 3) the romanticization of the working-class 'heartlander' through contemporary popular culture in confrontation with the politics of global capitalism and globalization, which Chong argues that offers the most popular symbols of Singaporean national identity.
Terence Chong, "Manufacturing Authenticity: The Cultural Production of National Identities in Singapore," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2011), pp. 877-897.
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