English-language pop music and some Tamil music.
This chapter is concerned with how the ideology of multiracialism in Singapore
is experienced, problematized and reconfigured by a particular group of people who
are subjected to it. Specifically, I will be analysing why and how third-generation
Punjabi youths in Singapore attempt to reconstruct their sense of self, their own
‘Punjabi-ness’, through the consumption of Bhangra music. I argue that cultural
identities provided by the CMIO scheme as well as those provided by first- and
second-generation Punjabis come to be meaningless for these third-generation
youths due to felt contradictions between and within these cultural systems.
Through the consumption of Bhangra music in clubs, these youths contest both the
meanings of multiracialism and parental ‘Punjabi-ness’, while constructing their
own meaningful sense of what it means to be Punjabi, reclaiming a sense of community
in the process. In my analysis, I consider this new way of being as a form
of ‘new ethnicity’ (as coined by Stuart Hall (1992)) in that the production of ‘new
Punjabi-ness’ embodies a form of ‘cultural diasporaization’ (ibid.: 170) which involves
appropriating signs and symbols from the past and presenting them through
modern technologies for the purpose of dealing with the contradictions of the
present. These contradictions, as I have mentioned, are created by the ‘race’–class
tensions embedded in state multiracialism. Although the boundaries and meanings
within multiracialism are reconfigured through the practice of consuming Bhangra
music, the boundaries of multiracialism remain very much intact. While the state
uses its own configuration of multiracialism to achieve its socio-political objectives,
this ‘new Punjabi-ness’ effectively uses the very logic of multiculturalism as
a foundation to access the right to representation, as well as the right to contest felt
marginality – its very own socio-political aim. In doing so, this practice reproduces
the cultural logic of essentialized cultural difference and closure.