Unfinished Business: Attempting Decoloniality and Upending Race and Knowledge in Malay Sketches and Merdeka/ A text in a foreign language. / A text in a foreign language.

Singapore’s relative lack of antagonism toward its history of British colonialism is a key focus of this chapter. I account for this by explaining the way the postcolonial state has co-opted the island’s colonial past to formulate a dominant narrative about Singapore’s progressive transformation from colony to nation and global city, with capitalist development as its seemingly inexorable engine. I employ the conceptual framework of decoloniality to examine how literature interrogates Singapore’s history as part of a larger impulse toward critical self-understanding and greater reflexivity. I discuss two texts in particular—Malay Sketches (2012) and Merdeka/ / (2019)—and consider how they attempt to unthink colonial epistemologies in Singapore pertaining to racial ontology and historical knowledge. A book of flash fiction by Alfian Sa’at, Malay Sketches explores the specific dynamics of Malay identity and inter-race relations in Singapore, where contemporary pressures of globality intersect with colonial legacies entrenched in everyday cross-cultural interactions. Merdeka/ / is a play by Alfian Sa’at and Neo Hai Bin staged as a critical response to the nation’s 2019 bicentennial commemoration of Raffles’s arrival in Singapore. In it, six characters assess British colonialism’s impact on Singapore by enacting key moments of the past, problematizing received history and the inherited colonial categories and logic which continue to stratify Singapore society and cohere it in certain ways. It explores the meaning of ‘merdeka’ or freedom to reveal how, despite all its trappings of modernity, Singapore has yet to fully decolonize.