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

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...