Failed Asian Values Subjects and Neoliberal State Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore

Abstract

Since the 1990s, and currently in state discourses of free-market integration, ruling Southeast Asian elites have deployed the narrative of Asian cultural ascendance – ‘Asian values’ discourse — as an explanation for Southeast Asian developmental exceptionalism. Ruling elites continue to push for a social consensus that mobilizes neoliberal capitalist subject-formation as the proper postcolonial nation-building teleology. However, my reading of the widely performed contemporary plays, Family, and Ang Tau Mui, A Modern Woman by highly acclaimed Malaysian-Chinese playwright, Leow Puay Tin, examines how the Asian values discourse is interrogated and disrupted through subaltern historiographical interventions that remember colonial-capitalist subjugation, social mobility failure and class fragmentation that are otherwise evacuated in the dominant retelling of Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese success stories.

Keywords:

• Asian Values
• Cultural Communication
• Neoliberalism
• Racialization
• Postcolonialism
• Southeast Asia

Notes

[1] Also, within Western national contexts, there have been social constructions of ethnic Asians as ‘model minority’ (Wu 2013; Rothmayr 2014) cultural groups in contrast to white and other ethno-racial minorities.

[2] Leow Puay Tin's work has been studied in relation to its critical significance to Southeast Asian theatre (Peterson 2001; Diamond 2002) and for its influential anti-racist and gender politics (Mandal 2004; Philip 2010; Rajendra and Wee 2007; Ambikaipaker 2013).

[3] See A.J. Stockwell (1982) and Daniel P.S. Goh's (2008) work on the emergence of colonial state formation and race in British Malaya.