Minstrelsy Beyond the ‘West’: Deflections, Continuities and the Un/Knowing of Race in Singapore

ABSTRACT

The blackface minstrel reflects Black histories of slavery, repression and dehumanisation that further devolved into a ‘mess of entertainment and politics, love and hate, attraction and repulsion, class and race consciousness, sincere imitation and cruel mockery’ (Strausbaugh, J., 2006. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture. New York: Penguin: 92). The racist origins of blackface hail from minstrel shows from the nineteenth century in the US, derogatorily mimicking Black slavery through the use of greasepaint or burnt cork, reproducing tropes of unruliness, slovenliness, hypersexuality and laziness. This portrayal was seen in theatre, film and animation, stretching across genres from the dramatic to comedy and vaudeville entertainment. While the origins of blackface vary from other forms of racial impersonation, they meet at the intersection of misrecognition and racism. Practices of racial impersonation beyond the ‘west’ raise questions of relevance, if for instance racial impersonation should be subject to criticisms of racism, given the latter’s ‘western’ provenance. Moving beyond this argument, this article asks what justifies the perpetuation of racial impersonation when blackface is no longer condoned elsewhere, and how themes such as racial inferiorisation and discrimination travel. With a brownface advertisement in Singapore as its case study, this article considers how racialised groups in other contexts are ‘minstrelised,’ and their implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• misrecognition
• postcolonialism
• racism

In 2019, an advertisement for NETS (Network for Electronic Transfers) EPay (a Singapore payment application) featured a male Chinese MediaCorp actor portraying four characters: a tudung (hijab) wearing Malay woman, an Indian man (with a name tag reading ‘K. Muthusamy’) in office wear, a Chinese woman in a pink jacket, and a Chinese man in blue overalls. The actor had his skin tone darkened to portray the Indian character. While some defended the advertisement as an attempt at humour, others questioned the very premise of brownface and why racial minorities were not hired instead, surfacing debate about racial hierarchies and discrimination in Singapore (Thanapal 2019; Stambaugh 2020).

The discourse that followed included criticisms of the advertisement as an example of brownface. Some rejected the labelling of the advertisement as racist arguing that it was unintentional. Others rejected the criticism of racial impersonation based on its irrelevance to the Singapore context. Firstly because of Singapore's multiracial creed, and secondly because of the cultural disconnect of blackface and minstrelsy, given its ‘western’ provenance in the US – which resulted in debates over the in/appropriate import of cultural values.

This article argues that brownface and other forms of racial impersonation are problematic in Singapore as a damaging production of raced bodies and highlights the implications of deflecting brownface as ‘irrelevant’. The difference in histories of race is not contested. However, the parallel between racial impersonation and minstrelsy lies in the ‘social signification of race’ (Winant, in Sommier 2020), where inferiorising stereotypes continue to be produced as natural and taken for granted. Moreover, justifications around intention and national ideology are part of a racial matrix that permits for exceptions, rationalisations of unintentionality, and an ‘unknowing’ of misrecognition.

The concept of misrecognition provides a framework for this article, where it refers to a combination of cultural, economic, political and epistemological oppression that qualifies redress (Taylor 1994; Fanon 2008; Fraser 2008; Martineau 2012). These processes are not always caused by deliberate manipulation. They may also be conducted through dominant narratives and rationalities governing justifications for racist acts. Drawing from scholarship on race and multiculturalism, this article furthers understandings of symbolic power as exceeding the conviction or exoneration of racists by identifying the ‘complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it’ (Bourdieu 1991: 164; Hancock 2008: 785). Analysing the production and consumption of the brownface advertisement in this way illuminates how misrecognition operates intertextually, through different modalities and technologies of power.

Acknowledging the contextual nature of blackface allows for equal acknowledgement of what brownface means in Singapore, contributing to otherwise scarce literature on what minstrelsy (as racial impersonation) entails outside the ‘west’. Brownface in Singapore shows how groups are misrecognised, where ethnic minorities in Singapore are subject to misrecognition on meaning-making and structural planes in the form of racial stereotypes and employment discrimination, simultaneously anchored and erased by a nationalist logic of multiracialism that undermines the existence of racism and discrimination.

This article argues that the brownface advertisement is symptomatic of wider neglect and absences in the discourse of race. I begin by outlining how the brownface incident played out, then situating it within the context of race and racism in Singapore, conventionally regarded as a multicultural society. After a methods note, the following sections proceed in three parts where I first contest the argument that brownface is irrelevant in Singapore because of its ‘western’ provenance, highlighting how the raced body exists in Singapore’s past and present. Second, through the conceptual lens of misrecognition, I discuss how arguments that the advertisement was unintentionally racist and as equivalent to innocuous performances is part of a wider meaning-making narrative about race in Singapore. This narrative misrecognises ethnic minorities by homogenising identities and stereotypes, and institutional discrimination. Third, I argue that national narratives of Singapore as ‘multiracial’ and maintaining a constructed threshold of civility are enabling forces for misrecognition and the neglect of its redress.

The Advertisement

The NETS EPay advertisement was called out on social media on July 26, 2019, for being racially insensitive.¹ Subsequently, police reports were lodged. NETS said at the time that the intent of the campaign ‘was to communicate that e-payment is for everyone’ (CNA 2019). Eventually, the advertisement was removed by NETS and apologies were issued by the creative agency behind the advertisement as well as The Celebrity Agency, MediaCorp’s celebrity management arm. Mediacorp is a government-owned media conglomerate in Singapore, the sole provider of free-to-air television channels in Singapore. Dennis Chew, the actor in the advertisement, also apologised for his role (Daud 2019). The advertising agency behind the campaign issued an apology stating that

[t]he message behind this advertising campaign is that e-payment is for everyone […] For that reason, Dennis Chew, well-known for his ability to portray multiple characters in a single production in a light-hearted way, was selected as the face of the campaign. He appears as characters from different walks of life in Singapore, bringing home the point that everyone can e-pay. (Stambaugh 2020)

Critical responses to the advertisement emerged on mainstream and social media. The advertisement was criticised for stereotypical and objectifying portrayals of ethnic minorities. An article describes the advertisement as a form of brownface ‘demonstrating that racial difference can be commodified’ (Thiagarajan 2019). The author also pointed out how it was just another instance of racism in Singapore on Twitter. @RubyThiagarajan, whose tweet was retweeted 4000 times as of writing said, ‘Brownface in a Singaporean ad in 2019. I thought we already went over this … ’. The embeddedness of racism in Singapore was further alluded to. Another Twitter user @visakanv said, ‘it’s time for a history of Singaporean Chinese people in Brownface’, with a thread that included references to blackface at workplace parties, a Singaporean-Chinese actor in a blackface role on a sitcom, and a Singaporean-Chinese actor who made a Deepavali greeting on Instagram (a post that has now been removed) in blackface.² Most visibly, the incident drew attention to the institutional racism that negatively affects workplace dynamics and job opportunities for ethnic minorities in Singapore. two Singaporean siblings, Preeti and Subhash Nair, highlighted the history of media representation of Indians in Singapore, referring to a case when a Singaporean-Chinese man wore a Sikh turban as his ‘costume’ on Deepavali, and instances of brownface in locally-produced media (Rice Media 2019).³ Eventually, the Singapore government ordered the video to be taken down and expressed concern that it might upset racial harmony in Singapore (Rice Media 2019; Wong 2019).

Context

Before moving forward, it is necessary to locate the incident in the context of Singapore, a nation-state that its government declared a ‘constitutionally multiracial state’ upon independence in 1965 (Chua 2003: 60). Multiracialism refers to the practice of cultural tolerance and provision of equal opportunity for advancement in Singapore (Hill and Lian 1995: 31).

Singapore’s ruling party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), fosters multiracialism as a national ideology and within that, racial and religious harmony as its key components. Then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong stated that ‘[if] there is no harmony, there will be no peaceful, prosperous Singapore – as simple as that’ (Goh, in Sinha 2005: 28). Through political rhetoric and public policy, multiracialism was and is conveyed as a pragmatic need, forming part of a political and economic agenda to maintain territorial loyalty and a sense of nationhood in place of then-perceived racially divided loyalties.

At present, every Singaporean is categorised at birth or naturalisation within the national census according to the same racialised groups. The state’s promotion of multiracialism is pursued within the policy framework through the Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others (CMIO) categorisations, where ‘Others’ refer to groups that do not fall into specific groupings, such as Eurasians and Caucasians. Singaporean citizens carry identity cards stating their race. These categories are problematic as a ‘discursive act which flattens and ‘homogenises’ ethnic, linguistic and religious differences within a category itself’ (BH Chua 2009a: 240). These categories are increasingly contested, where their relevance and inaccuracies have been called into question (Au-Yong 2016).

Yet, narratives of multiracialism prevail in rhetoric, policy, education and media. For instance, Singapore’s turbulent history is often revisited in order to reiterate the continual threat faced by a multiracial country, despite the relative peace that has ensued since the 1970s (Chua 2009b: 243). Reminders of the racial riots during the 1950s and 1960s recur in political rhetoric, emphasising the need for racial and religious harmony (Aljunied 2009: 20; Rahim 2012). While acknowledging the presence of racism in society, there remains an underlying message that racial harmony is still the defining cornerstone of Singapore’s progress. As Education Minister Lawrence Wong said in January 2021, ‘It is a big issue […] But is the situation today better than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago? I would say it is too’ (Ong 2021).

A bedrock of policymaking, multiracialism is however critiqued as an ‘instrument of control’ for the PAP (Chua 2003). State power is exercised through legal instruments that address issues of national security in relation to racial and religious tolerance. They include the Penal Code and Singapore Societies Act. Under the Penal Code (Section 298A), individuals who (or are perceived to) provoke enmity and hatred between groups on the basis of religion or race, or threaten the maintenance of harmony, are subject to imprisonment, a fine or both. Contrarily, these laws are criticised as mechanisms that are used, under the premise of protecting racial harmony, as tools to suppress civil society actors opposing the ruling party’s stronghold (Rahim 2012).

The narrative of multiracialism is also present in Singapore’s national curriculum within subjects such as Civic and Moral Education, as well as commemorative events. Racial Harmony Day is celebrated on 21st July every year to commemorate the 1964 race riots, where students dress in cultural attire associated with another ‘race’ and participate in cultural exchange exercises to commemorate the value of racial harmony – a performative experience that is both celebrated and critiqued in Singapore as a form of statecraft that produces a certain narrative of multiracialism (Sim 2005; MOE 2013). These mechanisms of socialisation maintain the authority of multiracialism and meritocracy (Barr 2006), concealing persistent inequalities that cut across race and class (Tan 2008b; Teo 2019).

Media plays a key role in the reproduction of national narratives, that of racial harmony and racial categories included. While the brownface incident may appear out of sorts with the raft of policies and practices that advocate multiracialism in Singapore, it is less surprising when taking into context the pre-eminence of maintaining the myth of racial categories in Singapore as a dominant and dominating trope in national narratives of unity and identity. In addition, the main media broadcasters in Singapore are state linked with the government as their key stakeholder, reflecting the landscape of media economics. These parameters of ‘controlled commodification’ facilitate a ‘docile and pliant communication environment’ aligned with the ‘nation-building aspirations of the PAP government’ (Lee 2019: 234).

The following sections explain how this same discourse of multiracialism may inadvertently be the wellspring for responses defending the advertisement, denying and concealing the racism of racial impersonations. While there are perceptions that the brownface advertisement and previous iterations are racist, there are also those who see them as not racist and not intended to cause harm to ethnic minorities. There is as such a certain exceptionalism and latitude accorded to Singapore where racial impersonations are rationalised as irrelevant and inaccurate in its multiracial context and therefore, not harmful or reflective of societal discrimination.

Methods

This article is derived from a larger study on ‘Youth and Racism in Singapore,’ that was conducted after the NETS EPay incident. It includes semi-structured interviews with 30 youth in Singapore from tertiary institutions. All participants were Singapore citizens (including naturalised citizens) and had lived in Singapore for at least ten years, whether continuously or in stages. They were evenly divided between sexes and the three official ‘races’ in Singapore: Chinese, Malay, and Indian (self-identified). Respondents were enrolled in three universities: National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Management University (SMU), across various courses ranging from the natural sciences to humanities. These primary findings are further substantiated by how race is constructed in discursive sites that also include social media and public fora.

This article does not always identify responses to the brownface advertisement based on sex or ethnicity for the primary reason that there were variances in responses across groups. While it may be perceived as a binary debate between a ‘majority’ and ‘minority,’ discussions reflected far more ambiguity and nuance that exceeds categories of race. This distinction does however appear where respondents discussed their lived experiences of race and racism, which then revealed clear differences between Singaporean-Chinese and ethnic minority groups.

The Ir/Relevance of Brownface

The brownface advertisement drew on harmful stereotypes, mocking caricatures, and the racialisation and inferiorisation of skin colour. There are clearly differences in Singapore’s and US’ history of race and the origins of blackface, in the same way that all histories bear similarities and differences. However, racial impersonation rests upon a shared history of colonial narratives and colonising practices. This is not to say that colonialism is all-encompassing and homogenising; it is after all ‘by definition transhistorical and unspecific’ (Slemon 1995: 106). There is nonetheless utility in unpacking racial domination at the intersection of economic arrangements, racial hierarchies and historical inequalities. This section first shows how criticisms of brownface are relevant in Singapore and second, how arguments of irrelevance deflect the history of racism and its implications in Singapore.

In the aftermath of the advertisement, various online posts explained the history of blackface and its damaging effects by drawing on the misrepresentation of Africa-Americans in US history through blackface in minstrel shows, and the negative stereotypes it perpetuated (Daud 2019). In response, the irrelevance and inaccuracy of labelling the advertisement as a case of ‘brownface’ in the context of Singapore was raised.⁴ While acknowledging that the advertisement was ‘ignorant’ and that ‘sometimes, people are become less mindful of their insensitivity to others,’ a critic argued in The Straits Times that ‘Brownface is not Singaporean’:

‘Brownface east’ does not exist. The painted face as racist slur belongs to Western culture[…] In Singapore, to the contrary, many people are quite pleased when someone of another race is keen to dress like us, cook our favourite traditional food and join in our cultural activities. (Chan 2019)

The narrative that blackface does not have the same racist implications as the US is a common refrain. But these narratives neglect how Blackface is problematic across contexts and geographies. Representations of Blackness are located within global narratives that position non-whiteness in subordination to whiteness. In the Netherlands, the figure of Zwarte Piet, a ‘moor from Spain,’ depicted as a helper with curly and thickly coloured wigs, was justified as ‘not a blackface but a person with a black face,’ and therefore of no relation to minstrels seen in the US (Erik van Muiswinkel, cited in De Beukalaer 2019). Moreover, it was argued that the racism attached to blackface was intrinsically associated with racism in the US, and not one coherent with the ‘Dutch self-perception as an innocently color blind and non-racist society’ (De Beukalaer 2019: 796). This trajectory of events was also seen in Australia and France where Similar occurrences of blackface in France were brushed aside as issues not relevant for their US-centrism (Sharpe and Hynes 2016; Sommier 2020).⁵

Where Blackness and minstrelsy refer to a specific treatment of African-ness, it intersects with narratives of whiteness and non-whiteness where the former ‘is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations’ (Mills 1997: 127). Being ‘not white’, when recognised as subjectivity within a racialised hierarchy, indicates subpersonhood and inferiority within race relations specific to the context. The concept of non-whiteness therefore extends beyond the geographies and histories of Blackness to other contexts, races, and race relations. When Charles Mills writes about non-whiteness in the context of the Black politic, he argued that whiteness is a concept of power that is fluid and not bound by geography or phenotypical whiteness. For instance, ‘all peoples can fall into Whiteness under the appropriate circumstances, as shown by the (‘White’) black Hutus’ 1994 massacre of half a million inferior black Tutsis’ (Mills 1997: 129).

As a marker of difference, whiteness and non-whiteness identifies the treatment of those who are perceived as racially and culturally different, while also demonstrating the temporality of ‘whiteness’. This ‘slipperiness’ (Hook 2005) of whiteness is evident in the racialisation of Irish and Muslims in the UK, and Jews, Irish and Italians in the US (Bonnett 1998; Modood 2017). Conversely, scholars of Chinese history write that elite Chinese saw themselves as white through associations of purity and beauty, traits that were contrasted to peasants as well as Persians, Malayans and Javanese where for instance a Chinese geographer of the early Ming period recorded that ‘people in Malacca have a black skin, but some are white: those are Chinese’ (Zhang Xie, cited in Bonnett 1998: 1033). It was only the western adoption of whiteness and assertion of Chinese ‘yellowness’ that buried the narrative of Chinese whiteness and the power relations it represented.

In the same way, racial impersonation when recognised as a form of minstrelsy has deeper implications beyond US history. Only associating blackface with the US reduces discourses to one that is only connected to a singular history of racism, neglecting traveling hierarchies and their transnational connections. For example, analyses of blackface in China signal colonial economic patterns with Africa, reproducing a ‘white-yellow-black’ hierarchy grounded in colonial discourse and colonial knowledge about the black body (Wigfall 2015: 236; Chow-Quesada and Tesfaye 2020). In Australia, blackface historically relates to the portrayal of Indigenous characters including King Billy Cokebottle as well as the Indigenous Australia Rules footballer Nicky Winmar (Stratton 2020: 172). Relying on culturalist language therefore deflects from the relevance of Blackness and non-whiteness in highlighting power relations within society. This denial ‘avoid[s] claims of racism; the inference is that it is simply cultural difference rather than racial inequality that is the real issue’ (Sharpe and Hynes 2016: 91). This traveling logic connecting non-whiteness to minstrelsy and racial inferiorisation is relevant to Singapore where racism is rooted in colonial constructions of race.⁶

The History of the Raced Body

Under British colonial rule, Singapore’s population was sorted based on a Furnivallian vision where colonial notions of race, based on essentialist assumptions of whiteness and non-whiteness, determined ethnic enclaves and assignations. The phenotypical treatment of race informed cultural stereotypes through skin colour, hair and employment during the colonial era reflects a history of racialised constructs steeped in Singapore’s past. Stereotypes are both function and product of colonial discourse that produces the ‘Other’, as Homi Bhabha (1994: 94–95) argues, where its ‘fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation[…] a form of knowledge and identification which vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’. This reproduction of racial stereotypes, while covert and subversive, is as such one that retains and normalises narratives about race and racialised groups.

Specific connections to Blackness in Singapore’s history and the derogatory term ‘nigger’ in Singapore’s history debunk arguments that connotations of blackface are only located in the ‘west’. Minstrel parties were ubiquitous during the colonial period, such as ‘costume races’ featuring British jockies in blackface to represent ‘A nigger’, ‘A White Eyed Kaffir,’ ‘Malay Costume’ and ‘A Heathen Chinese’ among others (Straits Times 1887). The Patriotic Concert of 1915 featured actors ‘in the costume of the perspiring though industrious sinkeh,’ later followed by a ‘Nigger Minstrel troupe’ that was ‘deservedly well received’ (Malaya Tribune 1915). Other similar events include sports games, concerts and balls (The S Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 1894, 1895; The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (Weekly) 1908; The Straits Times 1937; also see Kaur 2019).

There are parallels between colonial and postcolonial stereotypes. In the present, occasions of blackface include costume parties such as workplace events or on Halloween.⁷ These varying iterations and forms reflect a

polysemic flow of signifiers and signified – that ensures the longevity of stereotypes as they are adjusted to suit social, cultural, historical and political contexts[… affecting] how those experiences are verbalized, visualized, interpreted and translated into various kinds of social performance. (Russell 2012: 42)

While there are familiar ‘western’ racial iconographies in the production and reception of brownface in Singapore, they are also rinsed through a specific history and socio-political context that call out particular histories and forms of racism toward ethnic minorities in the nation-state.

With the understanding that ‘[r]ace and racism have a historical basis in any given context,’ colonial stereotypes of racial groups are inherited by the postcolonial state ‘with some degree of variation as part of its nation building project’ (Velayutham 2016: 459–460). This trajectory where blackness is associated with inferiority is evident in everyday forms of racism. In school, children hurl names at others of darker complexion using terms such as ‘blackie’, ‘black coffee’ (Lee et al. 2004: 128–130) and ‘black tofu’ (Velayutham 2009: 267). Parents influence their children through statements such as ‘that boy is black because he did not bathe’, or ‘do not hold the hands of that Indian girl, otherwise your hands will also turn black’ (Lee et al. 2004: 137) and that they ‘bathed in mud or excrement or never bathed at all’ (Velayutham 2009: 267). These statements reinforce tropes of blackness, involving a lack of hygiene and untouchability.

Phenotypical racism is often reflective of a more complex form of racism where they also include cultural racism (Modood 1997). This is more clearly visible in Singapore in relation to the portrayal of Malays in the media and associated stereotypes. Historically, inferiorising stereotypes of ethnic minorities, specifically the Malay community, were formed in comparison with those of Blacks in Europe. In 1970, a letter was sent to the British High Commission containing a memo by Robert Stimson titled ‘How multi-racial is Singapore?’. Stimson’s (1970) memo elaborates on the Malay ‘problem’ with particular references to their ‘lazy and slovenly’ ways in comparison to the efficiency of the Chinese population while associating them with African stereotypes:

In a sense the Malays represent Lee [Kuan Yew]’s negro problem and he takes it seriously. The encouraging point is that, even if the Malays are always likely to be at the lower end of the income and social scales in Singapore, the problem is relatively manageable and the Government has shown itself perfectly capable of handling it by giving special attention to the economic and social needs of the Malay population and to the black spots where the poorest Malays are concentrated.

The relationship between skin colour and social ills needs little explanation. Racism operates as a ‘lived experience’, where the ‘black problem’ represents the opposite of ‘the bright look of innocence, the white dove of peace, magical, heavenly light’ (Fanon 2008: 146). The examination of discrimination against African American men reinforces correlations drawn between colour and incomplete socialisation, and a tendency for violence (Collins 2004: 152). The naming of blackness operates the same way in Singapore where it is articulated as an inferior trait. The ‘minstrelisation’ of race inferiorises through representations and tropes that are not necessarily linked to the Black body but more broadly, the raced and Othered body. Criticisms of brownface are therefore relevant to Singapore, the denial of which erasing a history of racial subjugation and the persistence of misrecognition.

Misrecognition

Deflecting brownface as culturally irrelevant or unintentional occurs at the expense of recognising ethnic minorities, and their misrecognition in Singapore. Misrecognition is based on the notion that identities are co-constituted by the membership of a particular community, which may be ethnocultural, ethnonational or religious. To deny or inferiorise these groups constitutes a form of oppression as it injures an individual’s sense of self (Young 1990; Galeotti 2004). Because cultural and individual identities are co-constituted, misrecognition ‘can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred’, Taylor (1994: 25–26) argues that the positive recognition of differences in the public sphere should be treated as ‘a vital human need’, based on the premise that

[O]ur identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.

Further reframing the problem of misrecognition as one that exists on multiple levels enables a more holistic understanding of how misrecognition occurs through processes of meaning-making and knowledge-production (Martineau 2012: 161; 172). Insofar that narratives of multiracialism seek to affirm ‘race’, assumptions made about identities inadvertently ‘detract[s] attention away from the processes that produce misrecognition and may in fact be unhelpful in rectifying’ it (Martineau 2012: 162). Assumptions about race and cultural associations speak to the frustrations of misrecognition where ethnic differences are inferiorised or erased, institutional discrimination is ignored, and the circumstances of marginalisation are enabled.

Substantiating scholarship of racial discrimination in Singapore (for example, Tan 2009; Velayutham 2009), I record responses from interviews that articulate how the advertisement speaks directly to everyday and institutional racism in Singapore through the prevalence of stereotypes that seep into stereotypical media representations and discriminatory hiring practices.

Homogeneity and Stereotypes

On yellowface, Terrie Wong (2020: 2) writes that it is cultural appropriation where taking on racialised roles is just a

‘temporary racial gig for white actors who are not really required to acquire a deep knowledge of Asian cultural practices or history for their roles’ [… and a] non-Asian mimicry of Asian cultural aesthetics and peoples, racist mockery of Asian peoples and cultures, as well as stereotyping Asia(ns).

There is some similarity where the brownface advertisement demonstrates how racial impersonation represents ethnic groups inaccurately and homogeneously, and by those who do not possess the same lived experiences. This said, while much has been written about the ‘western’ representation of Asians, there is less said about intra-Asian representations and how they are perceived.

The advertisement reproduced homogenising racist stereotypes of ethnic minorities from Indian and Malay racial categories. Among respondents, it was notable that only ethnic minorities highlighted the racist stereotypes and institutional racism represented by the advertisements. They observed that the ‘darkening of the skin’ of the Indian character implied that all Indians have the same skin colour. These stereotypes were found to negate the heterogeneity of South Asians who are phenotypically and culturally diverse yet simplified in the advertisement:

[O]f course Indians cannot have light skin and Indians cannot have hair that’s not curly and of course they must be named Muthusamy.

Similarly, other minority respondents highlighted how the Malay character reproduced stereotypes of Malay women as ‘the stay home mum’ in a ‘baju kurong even though Malays most probably just wear baju kurong during Hari Raya[…] so it’s quite racist lah’. The view that the advertisement reproduced stereotypes echoed among other racial minority respondents, who said it ‘reduced’ Malays and Indians to certain stereotypes of ‘how an Indian friend should be or how a Makcik [Malay aunt] should be. Yah if anything I think it’s outright biased’. These comments refer to stereotypes that conflate Muslim and Malay identities, and the inaccurate assumption that Malays tend to wear cultural dress as a function of being unable to progress and modernise, compared to other ethnic groups in Singapore (Kwen and Ganapathy 2016: 106).

Reflecting on Wong’s comment, it is even more worrying that racial impersonations portray racial harmony in Singapore to some, neglecting the reality lived by ethnic minority. Respondents who described their reception of brownface as different from those who have not experienced similar forms of racism, and who therefore downplay oppression through skin colour. One said, ‘you’re trying hard to be someone who gets oppressed, like those with a ‘Malay’ skin tone’. The respondent related brownface to blackface where it is done ‘just for jokes when people have to live every day [with their skin colour], getting oppressed just by their skin colour [sic]’.

There are stereotypical portrayals of ethnicities in Singapore on sitcoms, radio shows and entertainment through brownface, accents and negative stereotypes (Tan 2004). Kenneth Paul Tan’s analysis of sitcoms, in particular, draws attention to infantile comedy that reproduce racialised, classed and gendered Malay and Indian stereotypes to reinforce the fantasy of Chinese racial homogeneity, ‘typical of the kind of mimetic content that reinforces a taken-for-granted simplification of complex realities’ (Tan 2008a: 143). This fantasy feeds into carefully curated narratives of multiculturalism in Singapore where there are neat categories of race, co-existing in a landscape of racial harmony.

Institutional Racism

Theories of misrecognition also address how the oppression of group-based identities occurs through and within ‘institutions (for example, schools, places of worship), [the distribution of] communal goods (for example, language, a territorial homeland) and claims to political authority (for example, the right to self-government)’ (Murphy 2011: 80). In this sense, media reflects society ‘in real life’. While ‘brownface’ does not in name originate in Singapore, the connection between brownface, stereotypes and institutional racism that it represents is one that is salient.

Dismissing the brownface advertisement as harmless or unintentionally hurtful erases the racial hierarchy that exists where ethnic minorities, specifically those who fall or are perceived to fall within the Malay and Indian categories, are subject to institutional discrimination. As a respondent said,

[S]kin colour has been an issue of racism and to take our skin colour and like put it on just for an advertisement, I would think that makes a racist.

While the image in the advertisement showed different racial groups in varying occupations, implying fair treatment and voice across ethnicities, the production of the advertisement indicated otherwise. Racial impersonation makes visible the institutional racism of hiring practices when actors from ethnic majorities perform minority characters while ethnic minority actors are passed over (Wong 2020: 2) and hints at the lack of representation in decision-making practices.

First, respondents explicitly questioned why racial minorities were not hired instead of relying on a Singaporean-Chinese actor, surfacing specific, contextual debates about racial hierarchies and discrimination in Singapore. The failure to hire racial minorities for the role is reflective of greater racial inequality in relation to employment and representation. Respondents expressed incredulity that a Chinese actor was chosen to play all the different racial groups rather than hiring racial minority actors to play the different roles. They did not accept how a Chinese actor in brownface could be preferred when ‘someone with a black face’ could be found and representatives of the minority groups are not in short supply. Furthermore, preferring a Chinese actor was seen to send a message that ‘Malays and Indians are not good enough’, and was taken to be a sign of ‘Chinese privilege’.

These responses resonate with the harm caused by racial impersonation, which extend beyond ‘just’ racial stereotypes as they reflect structural and historically embedded inequalities. These discussions expanded to general workplace inequalities through examples of lacking racial minority representation and opportunities. At times, race at its core was seen as the overall reason for preferential treatment. This view applied to both Singaporean-Malay and Singaporean-Indian groups. For instance, a respondent stated that preferring a Singaporean-Chinese actor sent a message that ‘Malays and Indians are not good enough’.

The view that ‘the majority race’ receives ‘preferential treatment’ in the wider workplace context particularly resonated among racial minority respondents, one of whom said they feel socio-economically ‘stuck’ because they are not given the same opportunities as Singaporean-Chinese to move ‘up the corporate ladder [that] would allow you to have more financial means[…] I feel that with that kind of racism, it hinders the minorities [sic]’. As another respondent put it, ‘Chinese always get the higher positions […] people always say, “Aiyah, you cannot get [the] chairman position ‘cause you’re not Chinese,” that kind of thing’.

Such observations reinforce respondents’ views that job opportunities are at least in part based on ‘the colour of your skin’. The parallel between employment discrimination through racial impersonation and systemic employment discrimination in the wider workforce is conspicuous, where discriminatory hiring practices favour Singaporean-Chinese over ethnic minorities, and experiences of workplace racism (for example, Velayutham 2009; Teo 2019). This re-inscription is, as such, a process that cuts across media and other institutions.

These findings cohered with a public discourse that saw the advertisement as reflective of institutional racism. Prolific various criticisms of the EPay NETS advertisement online show the anger and harm done to ethnic minorities. An Instagram user said, ‘Y’all this is legit brownface … you’ve literally got a Chinese dude playing ‘K. Muthusamy’, and ‘Malay women in tudungs [Muslim headscarves] are not fucking characters for you to impersonate’ (Coconuts 2019). The advertisement was a

reminder of the structural limitations Malays and Indians face. We may not have the same racial history as the West, but in Singapore, a people’s struggle for opportunities, for acceptance in an environment where Malays and Indians are the ‘other’ has become a tool for comedic purposes. (Zain 2019)

Second, the advertisement was perceived to reflect the lack of representation or legitimacy of views among minority groups in the decision-making process. Respondents believed the advertisement would have undergone many rounds of approval, and the fact that the campaign still saw light was indicative of institutional racism. Respondents from different races felt that for the advertisement to run, it would have gone through ‘a lot of layers’ and ‘rounds of […] approval’. That it did eventually run possibly suggests that there were no ‘minority people involved’ or, if there were, their views could have been dismissed as a failure to take a ‘joke’.

Third, the advertisement raised broader issues of institutional discrimination specifically in relation to Singaporean-Malays and experiences of hiring practices.⁸ A respondent said that stereotypes ‘just make it harder to get a job, we’re already Malay.’ Such comments allude to socioeconomic inequalities and the possibility of other racial biases in the job market that favour the Chinese. Other respondents referred to techniques used to avoid racialised hiring practices. For instance,

when we are sending out resumes, we always remind each other, don’t put your ‘Mohammad’, don’t put your ‘Binte’ whatever, ‘cause we feel that our chances of getting hired is lower[…] especially if our name has ‘Mohammad’ or like ‘Siti’.

These are experiences and narratives that racial minorities have internalised from a young age. They were forewarned by their parents to ‘be careful about certain things because we are the minority, so we have to put ourselves in a position where we are not open to all these criticisms,’ such as having a poor work ethic. Yet another respondent compared how Singaporean-Malays and Singaporean-Chinese are treated where

[I]f you put two normal Malay[…] and one normal Chinese, with same credentials, same results, same everything, then probably, probably I’ll be inclined to think that it’s the Chinese who will receive the job.

Overlooking the stereotypical portrayal of ethnic minorities in the media therefore also overlooks how they impact the lived experiences of discriminated groups. A respondent described his experience working at a recruitment firm where he was told to be ‘extra careful’ when hiring Malays, ‘by asking extra questions, like his background and everything’. The respondent alluded to the stereotype of Malays as being lazy, with the analogy that ‘for Chinese, if you fish five fishes a day, you keep fishing the five fishes. But for Malay[s], you will fish for 20 fishes, or 10 fishes one day and then you will slack off for the rest of the week’. While the respondent was initially taken aback by his employer’s request, he said that although one Malay employee ‘was really quite good and everything[…] the next day he did not turn up for work – it happened for not just one but quite a few Malays. So, I can’t say there are no statistics that back [up] the racism, but sometimes it [lazy behaviour] really happens for most of the Malays’. Interestingly, the same respondent did not see any racism in hiring practices towards Indians because they are ‘pretty hardworking’ as a group.

The stereotypes brownface and racial impersonation represent while different in their origins and effects of different racialised groups reflect power relations embedded within society. In Singapore, these power relations are entwined with a denial that discrimination exists, or that it is warranted based on stereotypes that are taken for granted.

The ‘Unseeing’ of Meanings

Beyond looking at the consequences of misrecognition in the form of everyday and institutional discrimination, Martineau (2012: 167) argues that there is also a ‘misrecognition in the communication of meaning’ that demonstrates a ‘failure to ese meanings as they appear to the agents involved’. This dimension of meaning-making in the space of misrecognition speaks to the maze of societal structures – or a ‘racial matrix’ – that both allows and obstructs perceptions of the Other. Misrecognition can therefore occur when we view the other through an ‘arrogant perception,’ where one unintentionally constructs the other from a position that lacks ‘acknowledgement of the way in which our own position shapes how we view others and the tendency to identify one’s own culture and values as “natural”’ (Frey, cited in Martineau 2012: 168).

This dimension of misrecognition explains how the brownface advertisement was perceived so differently across groups, where some viewed it as a ‘natural’ representation despite the racial hierarchies it represented while others were more critical of its racist implications. I argue here that the dominant ideology of multiracialism enables and permits a treatment of race that undermines its resonance, and moreover heightens the threshold for acts of discrimination. Drawing on Ricarda Hammar’s decolonial critique of ‘the civil,’ this section questions how civil codes and realities have been constructed as universal through multicultural horizons, anchoring it within a historical context and demonstrating the relationship between dominant groups and trajectories of racial discrimination.

There were also responses that revolved around a lack of knowledge, understanding and intent of racism. Its production may not intend to harm. However, while today’s producers and audiences may not ‘choose to continue to practice or suffer the active, overt racism that informed their [blackface] making[…], the social and material struggles that underpin that racism are still very much alive’ (Sammond 2015: 211). It is in this sense that the intentions are not as important as the ‘discursive racial matrix in which those intentions and acts became legible’ (Sammond 2015: 256). Maintaining assumptions about races and hierarchies is as such mutually exclusive from intent, and may instead indicate how entrenched they are in the habitus of Singapore’s multiracialism.

Multicultural Horizons

The implications of the brownface advertisement eluded many despite documentations of systemic and everyday racism. The reliance on culturalist language that differentiates ‘our’ society and history from that of the US allows for an exceptional multicultural identity to be maintained while denying the existence of racism as a disrupter to a hegemonic narrative. Anne-Marie Fortier describes the potential exclusions of multicultural national identity as ‘multicultural horizons,’ an intricate web composed of ‘simultaneous witnessing, questioning, and imagining: witnessing that the ‘we’ are multicultural … questioning how to achieve “integration with diversity” … and imagining the future of the multicultural nation’ (Fortier 2008: 3, original emphasis). Within these articulations are confident assertions of multicultural nationalism, which is ‘the reworking of the nation as inherently multicultural’ (Fortier 2008: 22). This construct forecloses the possibility of racism as intentional, harmful, or reflective of society at large.

The reinstatement Singapore’s multiracialism first appeared in the insistence that the racial tone of the advertisement was a positive representation of its national creed. Several respondents held the view that the advertisement was not racist, and considered the advertisement as one that was positive in its espousal of Singapore’s multiculturalism through the portrayal of ‘different cuisines, different outfits’. With this view, a respondent concluded that the advertisement did not contain ‘a single hint of racism’. This rationality is one familiar to Singapore’s narrative of multiracialism, where racial harmony forms the bedrock of national identity.

Second, the effectiveness of multiracialism as a national narrative, and commemorative practices as technologies of racial governance, was evident during interviews where respondents equated brownface in the advertisement as similar to their schooling experiences on Racial Harmony Day, where one ‘also wore the Muslim outfit[…] It’s the same as this [ad] right?’ The innocuous nature of racial impersonation is in this way justified through pre-existing practices. This embeddedness occurs when dominant themes (or ‘schemes’, according to Bourdieu) are continually reproduced intertextually, through for instance the production of racial stereotypes in television sitcoms, film and literature, while when ‘read’ together produce a dominant language that is made ‘natural’ (Thapar-Björkert et al. 2016: 145).

There was also ambivalence where respondents found themselves conflicted on the offensiveness of the advertisement while seeing it as an attempt at representation. A respondent said that ‘if he [the actor] did not paint the skin, I personally find it’s okay, [but because he did] it’s like a mockery and also sends out a message that Malays and Indians are not good enough to be on this ad,’ but clarified that the actor was trying to portray different races and therefore was unlikely to have intentionally caused hurt through brownface.

That the rationality of multiracialism supersedes the possibility of racism in Singapore speaks to a form of ‘symbolic violence by making particular interests and invested understandings and social relations of the world appear universal, natural, and true,’ legitimising sense-making narratives (Hancock 2008: 798). The discursive nature of multiracialism suggests that the denial of racism is not always intentional or a form of manipulation – as seen, respondents are not all cognisant of the racism of the brownface advertisement. Because practices are abstracted from the history of race and racialisation, there is an unknowing engagement in cultural practices and misrecognition. Consequently, dominant racial discourses are reproduced through the complicity of people ‘unaware that they are even participating in or perpetuating the very mechanisms that dominate them’ (Hancock 2008: 790). This unknowing while neither overt nor manipulative, operates at the interstices of power, where they buttress the dominant social order (Hancock 2008: 748). Constructions of a multiracial civility are seated in ‘signifiers in concrete histories,’ colonial associations with ‘the good’ and ‘universalized civil codes’ (Hammar 2020: 115). These indicators speak to the (re)production of multiracialism in postcolonial Singapore as an ideology rooted in history, norms, and symbolic significance.

Respondents also attempted to distinguish between ‘racist’ and ‘ignorant’, querying the intentionality of the advertisement as a racist act. For instance, while taking issue with the advertisement, a respondent clarified it appeared to be ignorance rather than racism because it was ‘not promoting racism,’ while others said they did not ‘know what his [the actor’s] intent was by doing this [brownface]’ or deduced that the advertisement ‘wasn’t done with ill intention’.

Discussions over intention, not knowing and ignorance demonstrate a lack of knowledge or ability to recognise the power hierarchies brownface and other forms of racial impersonations are etched within. This unknowing is variously discussed in race scholarship as a form of everyday racism and an effect of majoritarian privilege, where racial stereotypes are so deeply rooted that dominant members of society genuinely do not recognise acts as racist (Stratton 2011, 2020: 194). This also becomes a defensive mechanism, where ‘not-knowing, but also not wanting to know’ is criticised as a ‘smug ignorance: aggressively rejecting the possibility to know’ (Essed and Hoving, cited in De Beukalaer 2019). Not seeing racism may even be a sign of aphasia, where there is a ‘difficulty retrieving both conceptual and lexical vocabularies and, most important, a difficulty comprehending what is spoken’.

Justifications of ignorance moreover affect how ‘everyday racism tends to be cloaked’ through ‘claims to innocence’ and the ‘capacity of humour to normalize prejudice’ while reproducing ‘unnoticed ways through which a sense of belonging (or not fully belonging) to the nation is reproduced’ (Sharpe and Hynes 2016: 89). As discussed, categories of race and racial stereotypes are steeped in the nation’s colonial history and well-documented in archives and scholarship. The marginalisation of ethnic minorities is historically grounded and continues to present itself today. The unknowing-ness of racial marginalisation reflects a ‘projection of the ideal’ where racism does not exist in society, and if it does, it was never intended and therefore does not disrupt the ‘idea of perfect civility’ (Hammar 2020: 114) that dominates. Such a veneer smooths over the continuity of stereotypes and discrimination – the shortcoming of this very civility.

Threshold of Civility

For some, the advertisement was seen as funny, or as a joke ‘gone wrong’. Another critic pointed out the ‘racist Chinese gaze, [where] being Indian is the punchline’ and how ‘brownface is a way of demonstrating that racial difference can be commodified’ (Thanapal 2019; Thiagarajan 2019). Comparisons were made with other Singaporean television shows like The Noose, where actors portray different nationalities and races and described it as ‘[making] light of different races and just instill humour in it [sic]’. The role of racialised humour in Singapore manifests in everyday interactions, social media and more formal modes of public humour such as television sitcoms. The acceptability of brownface as unintentional, or a joke, indicates a threshold of civility based on the cultural idiosyncrasies of multicultural nationalism. The offense of brownface lies in how ethnic minorities are misrecognised, where misrecognition is understood as occurring on structural and meaning-making planes. The offense caused by a ‘painted face’ is not equivalent to dressing like another ethnicity. The slapstick style of the advertisement and its caricatures of each ‘race’ add multiple layers of racialisation, where ethnic minorities were subject to racial stereotypes through caricature and objectification.

The humour attributed to the advertisement speaks to a long history of racialised comedy that at once protects and endorses racism either as unintentional or a cultural idiosyncrasy. The uncritical reproduction of racist jokes normalises and neutralises its effects, reinforcing majoritarian norms and through that buttressing localised and racialised power dynamics (Wise and Velayutham 2020: 914). The view that racism is acceptable as a ‘joke’ is located within a commonly-held view that racial humour is part of Singapore’s way of multiculturalism, which exceeds the political correctness of other societies with a higher threshold of ‘acceptability’ (Wise and Velayutham 2020).

The use of minority cultural practices as a commercial practice, and even a comedic one, was criticised by respondents as ‘using race as a costume’. A respondent described the act as a form of ‘cosplay,’ while pointing out that ‘race is not something you can cosplay you know’. This speaks to the race play of blackface, which becomes an ‘embodiment without burden’ when players ignore the experiences and consequences of being a person of colour (Smith-Shomade 2007: 235).

The notion of a ‘sense of humour’ as collectively subscribed to, such as a ‘national sense of humour,’ is one that is constructed and ‘a relatively recent historical phenomenon’ (Sharpe and Hynes 2016: 92). This rationale moreover assumes a homogeneity in ‘national humour,’ excluding the targets of racist jokes and undermining their experiences of racism that these ‘jokes’ may well echo.

Racial impersonation brings the relationship between humour and symbolic violence into sharp relief. Laughing at the symbolic violence of characters allows audiences to ‘externalize the violence to the self that is daily life in the capitalist fantasy of a free society’ (Sammond 2015: 205). The comedy of blackface, through dress and gags, demonstrates how portrayals can be both racist and funny. The reproduction of stereotypes is effective where they appeal to existing prejudices and because they ‘circulate across forms and discourses’ (Sammond 2015: 10). While these may appear as trivial to those not subject to racial discrimination, they strike those among whom being the brunt of race-based jokes are a lived experience,

Experiences of racist jokes were notably articulated by ethnic minority respondents only. They described how ‘minorities do feel that they are still being discriminated against[…] maybe a few racist jokes now and then, like nothing too severe’ and that in the workplace, a ‘different accent from Singaporeans[…] tends to get mocked, like, immediately[…] regardless of whether it is an Indian Singaporean [or an Indian from India]’. While relations were described as ‘generally all very cordial with other races,’ there were moments when ‘we feel super comfortable and[…] some of us may just, like, “let loose,” and say things that are very disrespectful’ about or toward racial minorities.

That brownface representation constitutes a joke acutely highlights the codification of humour as an acceptable threshold of racism and a lack of understanding of multiculturalism. The coalescence of public humour and interactional humour is supported by previous scholarship. Elsewhere, Amanda Wise writes about how interactional humour is witnessed through workplace banter, where differences and stereotypes are permitted in a familiar and transgressive space. But she also points out that lines can and are crossed, and racist jokes that are initially ‘acceptable’ are turned into ‘a mask for expressing racist sentiments’, and that perceptions of humour are subjective, where targets of racist jokes who are in vulnerable positions ‘grin and bear it’, thus reinforcing inaccurate perceptions that racist jokes are innocuous (Wise and Velayutham 2020: 492).

Referring to W. E. B. Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’, Iris Marion Young (1990: 59–60) argues that cultural stereotypes are often internalised ‘at least to the extent that they are forced to react to behaviour of others influenced by those images’. This sensibility was evident among some respondents who said that when friends call them ‘black and all this […] its funny to them [Chinese], but it’s like casual racism. And I don’t mind it because it’s something that I’ve become used to’. The adaptation of respondents to jokes about their skin colour troubling. Yet, they speak to scholarship that find similar responses by ethnic minorities to systemic racism in Singapore as a matter of fact and their prerogative to ‘overcome’ (Teo 2019).

This reasoning of national humour around race resonates with observations that the visibility of race-play is ‘so much a part of our lives that we sometimes cease to view them as racial at all, or deny their racial origins and implications’ (Russell 2012: 48). The problem with racialised portrayals in the media is that it is ‘mimetic in the way it imitates the dominant “commonsense” meanings and values that are taken for granted’ (Tan 2008a: 94), reproducing racial stereotypes and normalising them through mainstream entertainment. The refusal to acknowledge brownface as minstrelsy, a deeply problematic mode of theatre, subjugates minoritised people of colour by failing to recognise the harm done and reproduces the symbolic violence that renders these representations natural.

Conclusion

Various practices of multiracialism have built a narrative of identity politics intrinsically tied to Singapore’s national identity and ideology. While the advertisement and reactions to it may initially appear out of sorts with this portrayal of Singaporean society, it is perhaps not that surprising that cracks that have always existed are becoming more visible. Fixed understandings of race and racial harmony contribute to a certain identity politics that is so rooted in ‘stability, homogeneity, closure, pre-ordained boundaries and in general a neat, fixed self-coherence’ that unravels simply with the acknowledgement that ‘any such political identity[…] will have none of these features’ (Calder 2011: 111). In a society like Singapore where multiracialism relies on categorisations of race and a fixed understanding of racial harmony, it is perhaps unsurprising that the brownface advertisement unsheathed racial divides and polarising views.

This article comes with the understanding that ‘we are always situated within a horizon of presuppositions, assumptions, and power relations, the totality of which can never become wholly transparent to us’ (Benhabib 1996: 78). Rather than dismissing brownface as a critique, this article considers how and why it resonated with segments of the public in Singapore, how it illuminates the lived experiences of ethnic minorities and what it says about racial discourse in the postcolonial state. With a postcolonial lens, this article questions the abstraction of brownface from colonial history. Identifying racial codes articulated through colonial practices of categorisation reinforces how one cannot ‘abstract and dissociate the civil code from the structures of domination that enabled it in the first place’ (Hammar 2020: 103). Second, this approach locates both minorities and majorities (or outgroups) within the same historical space. Doing so contests narratives that brownface is irrelevant to Singaporean society and therefore not reflective of racism in Singapore. Instead, I highlight how the racial discourse framing the issue is one that is shared and reflective of a continuous spell of meaning-making that abstracts racism from society.

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Notes on contributors

Terri-Anne Teo

Terri-Anne Teo is a Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

Notes

1 NETS EPay is an electronic payment system that is used at various hawker stalls in Singapore, and NETS is a financial services company that was appointed by various state-related bodies including Enterprise Singapore, the National Environment Agency, the Housing Board and JTC Corporation as a cashless payments system.

2 See, for instance, ‘It’s time for a History of Singaporean Chinese people in Brownface,’ Twitter, 30 July 2019, https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1156122999042404352?lang=en.

3 See Velayutham and Somaiah (2021) for their analysis of the rap video and the politics of racism in Singapore.

4 The utility of using terms borrowed from the ‘west’ is debated, and has indeed resurfaced in Singapore recently with the term ‘Chinese privilege’ (Goh and Chong 2020; Zainal and Abdullah 2019). My objective here is not to unknot the historical, etymological or theoretical origins of terminology, but to argue that completely dismissing these terms as non-existent overlooks the histories and lived experiences they represent to many.

5 This approach is taken by critiques of male characterisations and representations of Japanese girls in Japan, where the ‘cute, childlike and sometimes comically inept’ are related to the ‘sentimental and reassuring appeal of the humble, simple-minded “southern darkie”’ (Kinsella 2006: 83). While they are grounded in a racial cultural language, they find common ground in the power relations embedded within the production and consumption of caricatures.

6 In saying this one does not mean that racism is rooted in European colonialism or only in a hierarchy of whiteness as a social construction (Velayutham 2016: 471), but rather that even while contextualising racism there should be the recognition that there are intersections and connections across histories, populations and narratives.

7 Beyond Singapore, brownface has also been used as a form of comedy or mockery in Asia, such as Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan to portray stereotypes of ethnic minority groups (Cheung 2020; Editorial Staff 2021; Kuruvilla 2016).

8 This finding does not negate the workplace discrimination of South Asians in Singapore. For instance, Singaporean-Indians are questioned during interviews about whether they smoke or drink alcohol while Singaporean-Chinese applying for the same jobs are not subject to the same treatment (Teo 2019: 193).