The Political Biography of a Nation

Contemporary Singapore is riven by conflicts over class, language, and ethnicity, with profound societal fractures held together only by repressive legislation. But it did not have to be this way. From 1955 to 1963, anticolonial nationalists promoted a very different vision of post-colonial nationalism. Led by Lim Chi Siong, this movement defended a pluralist, multicultural and multilinguistic concept of Singaporean identity. The Political Biography of a Nation is the first account of this alternative project for nation-building after empire. It offers a new history of modern Singapore, rich with insight into the wider problems of national identity and state formation in deeply divided, unequal societies.