Performing national identity: the Singapore experiment

This study explores how national identity is constructed and sustained through performance. With the National Day Parade in Singapore as a highly textured case study, the article argues that when national history is performed, shaped, and sustained from above, it can be internalized as part of nation-building. The structure, context, forms, and processes of performing such history co-evolve with an emergent popular nationalism. Rather than being dismissed merely as a political farce, it may suggest an alternative path to understanding what is truly preserved in the popular memory.