Receptive Publics in Colonial Contexts: The Case of the Straits Philosophical Society
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Abstract
In cases where structural oppression conditions the broader public sphere, the democratic ideal of a receptive public may be threatened by at least two possible outcomes which appear to undermine its stated goal of increasing understanding of counterhegemonic ideas amongst mainstream, oppressive groups. Either (a) counterhegemonic ideas are defanged to make them sufficiently palatable to a new audience, or (b) counterhegemonic ideas are taken up intact, and as a result the extant networks of publics which depend on oppressive structures and hierarchies will be destroyed. As we will argue, in certain cases of colonialism such as the Straits Philosophical Society in colonial Singapore, the conditions which receptive publics are supposed to ameliorate: (i) the social costs of speech, (ii) inequality of epistemic labour, and (iii) the antagonism between groups, are not only an irreducible feature of counterhegemonic efforts, but are in fact increased in the attempt to maintain receptive publics. However, this may be more a feature than a bug: receptive publics need not be seen only as communicative intermediaries for oppressed groups, but as a possible dialectical step towards new modes of socio-material life.
Full Text
In recent years, much scholarship—philosophical and otherwise—has focused on problems of political fragmentation, the idea that discourse has become characterised by identity politics, and a pressing need to communicate across different experiences of oppression (e.g. Squires 2002; Burrows 2014; Mothsaathebe 2018; cf. Deumert 2019; Aikin and Talisse 2020; Dutilh Novaes 2020; Tanesini 2020; Broncano et al. 2021; Dommett and Verovšek 2021; de Ridder 2021; Jackson and Kreiss 2023; Hannon 2023). Habgood-Coote et al. (2024) have sought to shift the focus of this discussion from speech, and what is said, to listening, or how that speech is received and understood, with the concept of receptive publics.
Exploring historical instances of receptive publics, specifically those in colonial contexts, show that being bad at listening is not just a coincidental by-product of oppression, it is often a function of it. In this paper, we will focus on the dynamics of one such instance with the Straits Philosophical Society (1893–c.1921) as our case study, a coloniser-led learned society in fin-de-siècle Singapore (the administrative capital of the British Straits Settlements) whose object was “the critical discussion of questions in Philosophy, History, Theology, Literature, Science, and Art” (Rules of the Straits Philosophical Society 1910), setting out to draw on “the relative powers of the minds of the various nationalities in Singapore” after “so many generations in particular countries and callings,” including the “different powers of observation developed” by the “Tamils, Malays, and Chinese” (Warren 1893, 9).
The concept of receptive publics (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024) is a recent addition to the extensive ‘public sphere’ tradition, made famous by Jürgen Habermas (1989). As the problems we identify with receptive publics have their roots in this early work, and our proposed solutions build on existing critiques, we will begin by highlighting some key moves in this literature.
The ‘public sphere’ is the name given to forums for political discourse outside of formal, representative institutions. It encompasses spaces where ‘the masses’ can meet on a supposedly equal footing, in order to discuss issues of common concern, subject the decisions and actions of the authorities to ‘public reason’, and in doing so—supposedly—hold them accountable. The public sphere is sometimes referred to more colloquially as meeting in the ‘town square’ or the ‘public square’, in reference to the classical example of the ancient Greek agora—a marketplace where citizens would meet daily, to discuss social and political issues alongside buying and selling. Habermas himself focused on the function of seventeenth century coffee houses and salons in Europe, and more recently some have referred to social media sites—in particular the microblogging site Twitter1—as ‘the digital public square’ to indicate their centrality as a public location of political and social discourse.
This concept has been incredibly influential. Nancy Fraser says that “no attempt to understand the limits of actually existing late capitalist democracy can succeed without in some way or another making use of it” (Fraser 1990, p. 57). However, it has also been heavily criticised, most famously by Fraser herself (Fraser 1990. See also, e.g., Eley 1987; Landes 1988; Ryan 1990). She is sensitive to the way that Habermas uses the concept of the public sphere as both a description of actual and historical spaces, and as an ideal that we might strive to create, and how doing this obscures serious limitations with his account as formulated. Namely: Habermas’s original account gravely underplays the role of oppression in shaping discourse and discourse spaces. When wielding this—arguably indispensable—tool it is therefore important to be very clear about how to deploy it critically. Only then can we avoid repeating Habermases’ mistakes, and adequately illuminate current areas of political discourse.
Fraser points out that Habermas failed to properly acknowledge how marginalised groups (she focuses on women and the working class) were and are excluded from actually existing public spheres (Fraser 1990, pp. 59–60). This exclusion limits the range of topics that are considered legitimate for discussion, and so undermines the supposed purpose of holding powerful authorities to account. Similarly, Fraser argued that Habermas failed to recognise the existence of alternative discursive spaces (which she calls subaltern counterpublics) where these marginalised groups could, did, and do meet to discuss issues of common concern to them (Fraser 1990, pp. 60–61). Her examples of subaltern counterpublics include bourgeois, nineteenth century, women’s-only philanthropic organisations, which mirrored and sought to influence the main (bourgeois, male) public (Fraser 1990, p. 61) as well as a late-twentieth century feminist movement in North America, encompassing a “variegated array of journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centers, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals, and local meeting places” (Fraser 1990, p. 67).
Since then, Catherine Squires (2002), has synthesised the work of other feminist and African-American scholars to make further, important additions to this picture. She points to a wider range of subaltern counterpublics with more diverse functions, emphasising that counterpublics can influence the public sphere through strategies such as boycotts and civil disobedience. She also sketches out two other types of counterpublic space: enclaves are groups that produce counterhegemonic ideas and liberation strategies, but have to hide them from the main public for survival or to avoid sanctions—for example groups of African Americans organising under and against Jim Crow laws (Squires 2002, pp. 448 and 457–459). And satellites are groups which prefer to be separate, and so distance themselves from the public sphere, in order to maintain a distinct identity, but which may be involved in wider public discourses from time to time. Her example here is of the Nation of Islam (Squires 2002, pp. 448 and 463–464).
This leaves us with two important considerations to bear in mind when working with the concept of ‘the public sphere’. First, following Fraser, we should adopt a pluralistic picture of ‘the’ public sphere. Rather than occupying a single domain for social and political discussion, citizens generally find themselves spread between various spheres of debate (also see Asen 2018 on this point). These may differ in their demographic composition [think, for example, of Black Twitter as a distinct counterpublic from ‘the’ main digital public square (Graham and Smith 2016)] but also, importantly—and as Squires pointed out—their function. These two points are crucial to understanding both what the role of receptive publics could be, and how—as we will argue in section E—that role might be self-defeating, at least in colonial contexts.
With this groundwork laid, we can now introduce the subject of this paper: receptive publics. Habgood-Coote et al. have analysed the contemporary understanding of the phenomenon of ‘cancel culture’ in terms of multiple publics (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024). They posit that the rise of social media (alongside other social and political changes) has led some groups which previously functioned as enclaves to function instead as counterpublics, and so to go from hiding their counterhegemonic ideas to attempting to use them to influence ‘the’ main (or, more accurately, the range of more dominant) public(s). Prominent examples include the #MeToo movement, and Black Lives Matter.
Habgood-Coote et al. posit that this shift has contributed to an increase in inter-group friction. This is sometimes—typically from the perspective of dominant groups—described as ‘cancel culture’—(the idea that there are very high social costs for speech which flouts a narrow and recent set of social norms) (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 114). Whilst a range of corresponding effects on marginalised groups have been highlighted by social epistemologists, such as: epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007); epistemic oppression (Dotson 2014); and epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016). Habgood-Coote et al. attribute this state of affairs to a more general problem, one they call ‘the Listening Problem’: a failure to appropriately receive and understand concepts of marginalised and minority groups, due to the fact that public discourse and its supporting institutions are “organised around the perspectives and interests of dominant and majority groups.”
In an ideal receptive public these problems would not be prohibitive, as the not-saliently-oppressed would be aware of the likelihood of feeling threatened, and would “put that friction to work” to develop more nuanced understandings (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 138); they would recognise inequalities in epistemic labour and strive to be responsible, active listeners (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 138; Notess 2019); and they would endeavour to be the kind of audience which “is willing to put in interpretative work” and “pursue strategies of communication that do not assume a basic level of hostility” (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 139). They hope that conceptualising these publics will support the creation of new ones, or the better maintenance and management of those that already exist.
The developmental function of receptive publics is to develop the dominant members’ understanding of the kind of oppression that the receptive public is focused on, as well as the skills that are needed for receptivity/listening (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 130), whilst the amplificatory function is to support the influencing of dominant publics, by sharing, repeating, and backing up counterhegemonic ideas with other members of these publics (cf. Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 133).
The thrust of Fraser’s critique, above, was that public discourse in “modern stratified societies characterised by exclusionary public spheres” should aim not at a single, unified public, “but at a network of connected publics” (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 127), whilst Squires emphasised that these publics fulfil a diverse range of functions. In conceptualising receptive publics, Habgood-Coote et al. identify an additional type of public which they characterise by the developmental and amplifactory functions explained above, and by the goals of seeking to ‘influence the public sphere’ and ‘ameliorate marginalisation in the public sphere.’ We will suggest that—at least in some public spheres—these goals are too conciliatory. This is most clear in the case of colonial publics, i.e. publics that are embedded colonial systems (e.g. the British Empire).
For example, Habermas’ coffee houses, seen as crucial for capitalism’s triumph over feudalism, required the non-epistemic labour of those “[w]omen of a less exalted social status [who] found it much easier to enter a coffeehouse than their genteel sisters, not least because the majority of them were there to serve the male patrons” (Cowan 2005, p. 250). And, as media theorist Wendy Willems has recently noted, at the centre of the British Empire, “coffee houses and newspapers [in London] were intricately linked to the slave trade and slavery in a number of ways”:
A third link relates to the way in which the coffee houses acted as spaces where colonial commodities like sugar, which were produced in slave-based economies in the Caribbean, were consumed. […] those consuming sugar also were able to do so as a result of the violence that enslaved people were subjected to on the plantations. (Willems 2023, 20–21)
That is, such institutions, qua sites defined by such commodity consumption, were existentially dependent on products of colonial expropriation (e.g. coffee beans, sugar) that involves, but is not limited to, land-grabbing, the slave (and later coolie) trade, as well as ecological destruction (see Arifin 2023; Combrink 2021, Marquese 2022). The particular social structure of the coffee house—which Habermas would regard as foundational to the public sphere writ large—was therefore not only causally constructed by colonial expropriation, being a structure that came into being due to expropriation, but also constitutively constructed by colonial expropriation, being a structure that functioned to uphold the status of white, bourgeois, imperial elites and shaped the emergent ideas that echoed accordingly therein—such as John Locke’s notorious positions on land-grabbing and slavery in the British colonisation of America (Farr 2008; cf. Haslanger 2003).
In such situations, the exclusionary nature of such colonial publics is neither due to “incidental departures from the constitutional ideals of [public] spheres” nor a result of misrecognising counterpublics (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 125), as much as they are features of the colonial public itself. As Fraser herself more recently observes, “the subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits [with the mediation of a wage contract]” (Fraser 2016, p. 166). Expectedly then, the causal and constitutive construction of (at least some) colonial publics by expropriation may also be found in peripheral spaces within the broader imperial public sphere established by a pan-imperial network of publishers and readers (see Raymond and Moxham 2016).2 Our focus here is on one such case, approaching the Straits Philosophical Society additionally as a receptive public—albeit ultimately a false one. Since it is unlikely that our readers would be familiar with this particular piece of intellectual history at the colonial peripheries, we will now outline in some detail the historical aspiration and failure of the society as, effectively, a receptive public for Sinophone counterhegemonic ideas in the public sphere of the British Empire.
Singapore, which became a British colony in 1819, presented a particular politico-epistemic conundrum for its colonial administrators, who founded it with an “‘enlightened’ approach to empire,” drawn from “Enlightenment ideas of progress and liberalism” on “criticism of the mercantilism of the Dutch” (Lim & Brophy 2023, p. 12). The administration’s commitment to the colony’s status as a free port, alongside the plantations they set up in both Singapore and the Malayan states (to compete with the Dutch in Southeast Asia), led to an influx of Chinese migrant labourers to the British Straits Settlements—such that they became the majority ethnic group in Singapore by the 1840s. These Straits Chinese migrants were overwhelmingly wage- or day-labourers (including many ‘coolie’ labourers and sex workers) from Southern China, who did not receive any formal education—much less an anglophone one. Furthermore, due the Flint Affair in 1759 in China,3 as a consequence of which the Qianlong Emperor banned the teaching of Chinese languages to foreigners on pain of death (until the Treaty of Wanghia in 1844), the initially India-based colonial administration and anglophone merchants neither had the experience nor the linguistic and cultural knowledge to govern and organise this burgeoning population. Colonial administrators and merchants in Singapore thus found themselves having to rely on a small but significant portion of (Peranakan) Chinese migrants who came instead from the surrounding archipelago—e.g. Malacca, Riau—with pre-existing capital and an eagerness to learn the English language for trade.4 This group (the babas) effectively became—and also saw themselves as—intermediaries for the wider Chinese populace and British colonisers (Teo 2019).
Newspaper presses, e.g. The Singapore Free Press and The Straits Times, and publishing houses flourished as a result of a broad commitment by administrators to liberty of the press (after a gagging act in the colonies was lifted in 1835). And with the inward circulation of newspapers like British-based Financial Times and The Guardian, in addition to the outward circulation of local publications within the empire, Singapore quickly became integrated into the imperial public sphere. That said, the local presses were hardly representative of the concerns of the colony’s largest population for about a century, until the establishment of the Malaya Tribune in 1913, which aimed “[t]o represent the views and interests of the Asian communities” (Wong 1951, p. 2).
We can now understand more of the colonial motivations surrounding the founding of the Straits Philosophical Society in 1893 (see also Lim & Brophy 2023; cf. Jose 1998), as well as the introductory address of the first president of the Straits Philosophical Society,5 quoted at the outset of this paper, that it “would be a very worthy and proper object for a Philosophical Society to have in view” the development of “the relative powers of the minds of the various nationalities in Singapore” (Warren 1893, p. 10). He specifically highlights an interest in knowing whether the supposition that “the Chinaman [sic] is a very accurate and close observer […] extends to all matters in everyday life” and also a desire “to ascertain how [the Chinese person] first exercises these faculties, i.e. whether they are cultivated by his parents or whether his own innate thriftiness induces their cultivation,”—noting further that such an undertaking by the Straits Philosophical Society “would be the case of Singapore setting the example of doing what will certainly have to be undertaken at home in a few years” (ibid., 9–10).
Apart from the core members of the Straits Philosophical Society, the society otherwise had a pan-imperial membership and readership: originators of essays and criticisms in the extant record of the society’s proceedings include residents in not only Singapore but also London, Edinburgh, Ceylon, South Africa, and the rest of British Malaya. This was organised by an elected Executive Committee, consisting of “a President, a Secretary, and three other Members who [were] elected annually” (Rules of the Straits Philosophical Society 1910, p. 1). And while in its early years “discussions following the talks were designed to institutionalize ‘freedom of thought and expression,’ outside of the gaze of the colony’s developing public sphere,” contributions were reproduced in print elsewhere: e.g., with an anthology of earlier contributions compiled by the society’s then-president in 1913 or with “proceedings of subsequent years 1911–1916 […] made available in pamphlet form by the Methodist Publishing House of Singapore” (Lim and Brophy 2023, pp. 5–6). Contributions between the Straits Philosophical Society and the Straits branch of the Royal Asiatic Society also sometimes overlapped.
Given the aforementioned context and a broadly liberal orientation of the colonial administration (Jose 2010), that the first president of the Straits Philosophical Society would aspire for it to effectively become a bona fide space that was particularly receptive to the epistemic contributions of the Chinese population—i.e. a receptive public—is thus unsurprising. In fact, of the members (exclusively men) constituting the society throughout its years, only two core members were Chinese: Tan Teck Soon (1859–1922) and Lim Boon Keng (1869–1957). Both men, each internationally reputed then for their knowledge of Chinese philosophy and culture, were simultaneously involved in a broader Straits Chinese counterpublic through various community initiatives, such as the Amateur Drawing Association or the creation of or contributions to the Straits Chinese Magazine. The latter was a quarterly anglophone periodical that not only centred the voices of the Straits Chinese but also included contributions by their colonisers in an effort to promote mutual understanding (Holden 1998; Fermanis 2021). Contributions by the Straits Philosophical Society were also sometimes reprinted in the magazine.
However, it should be underscored that the construction of the Straits Philosophical Society as a public space in 1893 was also due to the wealth accumulated by the colonial administration in the preceding decades—most notably through the opium trade which was undergirded by the ‘coolie’ trade. As historian Carl Trocki notes, “[i]t is difficult to see how the British could have taken control of the commerce of India, China, and Southeast Asia in less than half a century without opium” as “the major form of economic leverage” (Trocki 1990, p. 221). Such expropriation was, furthermore, often a self-conscious enterprise: “Anglophone capitalists understood the close connection of contraband opium to Chinese captive labor, cynically linking them as ‘poison and pigs’ […]—their cash cows” (Driscoll 2021, p. 5). And as set out in its rules, the society would meet monthly for dinner in a hotel—and the only extant photograph of the society locates them at the table of the most prestigious Singapore Club, a site that gathered the chief economic and political players in the colony (Makepeace et al. 1921, p. 302). Moreover, membership was restricted to graduates from recognised (Euroamerican) universities, “[f]ellows of a recognised Learned or Scientific Society,” or otherwise deemed by the society’s members to be “of distinguished merit […] in any branch of knowledge” (Rules
1910, 2). Coupled with a $5 entrance fee, $25 annual fees (increased from $15 in 1893) and fines for absentees, at a time when average real wage was $93–111 among a predominantly impoverished population (Choy and Sugimoto 2018), the makeup of participants was restricted to a particular socio-economic class. Society discussions often reflected this: for example, the withholding of applying liberal principles to ‘oriental dependencies’ or negative eugenics.
Both Tan and Lim often had to work to temper their tones when criticising the colonial administration—with an eloquence and mannerism befitting of an ‘English gentleman.’ (On rare occasions, this temperance slipped to deleterious effects on the discussion.) Yet, Tan’s consistent attempts to bring the grievances and contributions of the disadvantaged Straits Chinese population in Singapore (e.g., women sex workers and labourers, whom he passionately defends elsewhere) to the attention of the colonial administrators in audience still often went unappreciated. Tan’s essay analysing Chinese local trade (now cited by historians as an authoritative contemporary source) was even denounced by his critic as unworthy of the society’s time altogether (Allinson 1901).
Criticisms were also launched by Tan of their colonial interlocutors’ “feeble and spasmodic attempts […]to understand and comprehend the natives who surround [them] on every side” (Tan 1902, p. 63): such as the colonial members’ avoidance of presenting any essay on Chinese philosophy, religion, and culture (except one time, in the absence of both Tan and Lim). Criticisms and discussions on these topics (almost always prefaced with protracted disclaimers about their ignorance and inexperience) were otherwise only prompted by the two Chinese members—and were often only tangentially related. Lim was recorded responding to the discussion following his essay on “The Influence of Religion in China,” wherein his interlocutors meandered about concerns of the religious beliefs of the babas, the incapacities of the Chinese student of morality, and the Christian deity:
He [Lim] had advanced a number of views in hopes of obtaining additional information regarding the influence of foreign religions upon each other in early times and regarding the development of religion in China, but the discussion had centred round other points, and no information had been given to elucidate the question in which he was most interested. (Wilkinson 1895, 74)
Moreover, Lim’s attempt to introduce the idea of a “tendency to over-legislation” in an essay was summarily rebuffed by his critic as not only non-existent in the colony but nonsensical—with the latter asserting that “we want more legislation, and less consideration for individual rights” (Ritchie 1906, p. 80). Meanwhile, a similar critique made by Tan concerning British discriminatory restrictions on higher offices in the Chinese-controlled Imperial Maritime Custom Service was met with outrage and disbelief at the lack of appreciation for the Empire’s efforts to improve the world (Thomas 1907, see also Wilson 2025). The critic of Tan’s aforementioned essay on Chinese local trade would even conclude with a dehumanising (yet common) comparison between Chinese people and dogs. The reception of Tan and Lim’s counterhegemonic ideas within the space of the Straits Philosophical Society was thus continually frustrated by the defensiveness of their interlocutors with respect to the colonial situation (cf. Jose 1998).
With (Da), Pr would risk either defanging counterhegemonic ideas as they assimilate such ideas into their extant, hegemonic conceptual scheme [i.e. a Type 2 Failure]. This is a bigger problem than Habgood-Coote et al. noted when they attended to the appropriation (or expropriation) of counterhegemonic ideas. Often, counterhegemonic ideas target fundamental hegemonic ideals—thought to be precisely the animating ideals of expropriation—that, should these fundamental ideals not be unseated, necessitates incoming ideas to be appropriated accordingly. Tommy Curry has noted an “epistemic convergence [of African American philosophy] with white philosophical traditions,” with “historic Black thinkers [made] safe for white consumption by reading the importance of race and the centrality of culture out of Black thought”—e.g. “W.E.B. Dubois is read as the Black Hegel, the Black James, the Black Dewey, and Frantz Fanon as a Black Sartre or Husserl” (Curry 2011, 315–6). As Curry observes, following Sylvia Wynter, this is due to how, “insofar as Blacks are human or claim their humanity,” they must always appeal to an “always already” fixed ideal of “European humanity believed to be universal” which “Black’s humanity” are presumed as “analogous with […] regardless of its anthropological assumptions” (Curry 2011, p. 323, emphasis added). Similarly, attempts to comprehend Confucianism and Daoism by colonial interlocutors in the Straits Philosophical Society often relied on reductive comparisons that mapped Chinese philosophers too quickly onto those with which they were more familiar, such as “Confucius [being] the Aristotle, [Laozi] the Plato of China” (Lamont 1895, p. 66; cf. Kirloskar-Steinbach and Kalmanson 2021).
Notably, Tan and Lim themselves also often engaged in a similar comparatism when expounding on Chinese-philosophical concepts to an anglophone audience—coloniser or colonised. Tan, for example, in introducing Chinese religions to his interlocutors, described ‘Dao’ “in Kantian phraseology” as “the category of the ‘a priori’ or the ‘purely formal’,” albeit still being careful to distinguish between the “more abstract and intellectual” nature of the “European philosopher’s representation” and the “more concrete and objective” one of “the Chinese” (Tan 1912, p. 98). Characterising Daoism as “a system of transcendental philosophy,” Tan further admitted that its “ontological speculations are considered by some to be Hegelian in their main tendency” (ibid.).6 As literary scholar Porscha Fermanis notes in her examination of Tan and Lim’s contributions to the Straits Chinese Magazine, “Lim and Tan [saw] comparatism as a means of empowering Chinese civilisation within an increasingly racialised imperial world-system” (2021, p. 361). This, however, remains in tension with how “the magazine is conventionally read as an apology for both British and Chinese imperialism,” where “loyalism and participation in the colonial public sphere is seen as false consciousness, at odds with the more authentic forms of radicalism associated with workers and peasants in the kampongs.” (p. 371).
Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali’s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods [1911–1914 at Harvard], left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after—and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys—lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle [1910–1916 at Harvard, Sorbonne, Oxford]. And I came to the conclusion—seeing also that the ‘influence’ of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding—that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do. (Eliot 1934, 40–41, emphasis added)
While it is unclear whether a similar psychological threat presented itself to the unreceptive colonisers of the Straits Philosophical Society, the fear of ‘forgetting how to think and feel as X’ was not foreign as a concept to them. Lim made an inverse point about the cost of Christianisation for Chinese people in his debut essay, that “the missionary has not sufficiently realised […] a Chinaman can scarcely be a Christian in China without becoming almost completely denationalised,” going further to claim also that “[t]he very social fabric of China must be broken up if the Chinese as a whole become Christian” (Lim 1895, p. 62). Lim himself would have been intimately familiar with Eliot’s ‘practical as well as sentimental reasons,’ having been baptised in a church during his medical studies in Edinburgh just a couple of years earlier—though publicly moving away from Christianity in favour of Confucianism altogether after this essay.
Yet, it is clear that some degree of commensurability between the ideals of the sympathetic members of a receptive public who are not saliently oppressed and the ideals of the saliently oppressed members is a condition of the very possibility of a receptive public. This was a position otherwise affirmed by Tan and Lim in their efforts to communicate their ideas. In the former’s 1898 review of Paul Carus’ Buddhism and Its Christian Critics for the Straits Chinese Magazine, for example, Tan remarked on an overall progression in the broader European reception of Chinese ideas: from the translations of “the French savants Abel Remusat [Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat] and Stanislas Julien” which formed “a new and more favourable opinion […] as regards the utility of Chinese literature and the capabilities of the Chinese race”; to “the basic elements of Chinese civilization [being] revealed and to some extent appreciated” by “scholars such as Legge, [Samuel] Beal, [Thomas] Watters, and [Herbert A.] Giles”; and to “the philosophic studies of scholars of the New World [such as Carus]” providing “the fairest estimate of Chinese characteristics but also […] the deepest insight into Chinese faith and beliefs”—the last of which Tan hoped would “transcend all racial distinctions and eventually re-enlighten even ourselves [i.e., the Straits Chinese]” (Tan 1898, p. 31; cf. Fermanis 2021).
However, what was clear that would have undergirded (Db) among some members within the Straits Philosophical Society who were not saliently oppressed was a dominant assumption of a categorical incommensurability that echoed Kipling’s sentiment that ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ We can find different kinds of such incommensurability articulated: e.g., foundational incommensurability, where “the foundations that traditions use to make sense of the world around them are so different from one another that members of these traditions cannot understand one another”; linguistic incommensurability, where “philosophical traditions from different cultures depend on distinctive languages that cannot be translated into one another” (Connolly 2023, p. 72).7 The 1907 presidential address to the society, by a then-newly elected Henry N. Ridley, put forward a position of foundational incommensurability between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ coupled with a more-than-tacit declaration of his preference for his ‘own’ tradition and ideals. Ridley noted that while “East and West are meeting on physical grounds” and “[the Orientals] may graft the best parts of the Western civilization on the best of the Eastern, and so further the development of the human race” (with the address neglecting the possibility of the converse), “Oriental and Occidental will remain distinct to the end of time” (1907, pp. 11–13).
And, just a decade before, Straits Philosophical Society member Archibald Lamont (1864–1933) gave voice to a concern for linguistic incommensurability in a direct contribution of his to the Straits Chinese Magazine. (Whether Lamont actually believed the position he put forward is unclear from the contribution.) Lamont was a graduate in ethics from the University of Glasgow, a Presbyterian minister, and had been Tan’s collaborator on the 1894 novel Bright Celestials: A Chinaman at Home and Abroad, as well as The Daily Advertiser, which they co-owned and ran together in the same year. Lamont’s contribution to the Straits Chinese Magazine was a fictional dialogue between European & Straits Chinese spiritualists and the ghosts of Shakespeare & Confucius in a séance, in which “Shakespeare stands as a symbol for ethnocentrism on a grand scale, as well as for the ways in which western literary classics lose their meaning and value outside of a European context” and “Confucius fares little better” (Fermanis 2021, p. 369). Fermanis notes that “the story ends without any sense of agreement between the Straits Chinese and their British friends, pointing to the incommensurability of their religious beliefs and their positions as coloniser and colonised, as well as to the failure of either Shakespeare or Confucius, as representative figures of a western and eastern canon, to adequately speak to or reconcile those positions” (ibid.).
Both these horns, (Da) and (Db), thus result in what Filipa Melo Lopes calls “meaning vertigo” with respect to Pr’s social being, which is a “perception of a vertiginous and unsettling emptiness at the level of social meaning” that, “while [it] may not exactly track reality, it nevertheless constitutes a very real anxiety” that may prompt backlash on the part of Pr (Melo Lopes 2019, p. 2531).
Consider, for example, how the aforementioned novel Brights Celestials by Straits Philosophical Society members Lamont and Tan was received in the imperial metropole of London (published under the pseudonym ‘John Coming Chinaman’ by Lamont). The novel followed the life of Tek Chiu, a ‘coolie’-turned-public-official from his hometown in Southern China, through Dutch Java, to Singapore, aiming to illuminate Chinese life both within China and abroad in the colonies, specifically in the context of Christian missionary efforts—unique at the time for offering such considerations through a Chinese narrative perspective. Unlike a conventional novel, its chapters were peppered with sociological observations focusing on topics under the British such as dehumanising practice of the ‘coolie’ trade, gender inequality in Chinese culture, Chinese secret societies, the uses and abuses of opium, and the transnational flesh trade. Lamont and Tan’s attempt to amplify a Chinese perspective on these concerns within the broader colonial public sphere, however, was received more as a cultural curiosity or fascinating postcard: it had a mixed reception among metropolitan reviewers, praised largely for its unique selling point, but panned for its style and relative optimism about the prospects of Christian missions among the Chinese.8 Further, between 1904 to 1910, the British Conservative government imported more than 60,000 ‘coolie’ labourers to work the gold mines in Witwatersrand to recuperate losses from the Second Boer War (see Yap and Man 1996). The subsequent backlash over this policy, which contributed strongly to the Liberal Party’s landslide victory over the Conservatives, was split between outrage over ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Chinese slavery’—the latter being more likely due to humanitarian reports of how Chinese labourers were treated rather than the efforts of the two Straits Philosophical Society members.
While not involving the ‘violent overthrow’ of oppressors, we find a similar fragmentation of the extant public sphere to have occurred with certain members of the Straits Philosophical Society. Lamont returned to Scotland in 1896 (or 1897). It is unclear what exactly motivated Lamont to leave Singapore, between the withdrawal of support for his educational efforts in Singapore by the English Presbyterian Mission and his undertaking a BD (see Mouton 1989; Johnson 2001). But Lamont’s more liberal stand against racial prejudice was also incongruent with the colony being increasingly enamoured with racial hierarchy and the authoritarian approach in Dutch Java, contra the colony’s broader liberal commitments—as expressed by some colonial administrators who were also society members, e.g. the aforementioned Ridley (see Lim & Brophy 2023). Reportedly, for Lamont,
Race prejudice or colour question was not in the dictionary of his life. He mixed with all sections freely and his labour ideals marked the feeling of generosity, of sympathy and of uplift towards the working man of any class or creed. (“The late Mr Lamont” 1933, 193; quoted in Mouton 1989, 66)
Besides, fancy what Singapore would have done if it had not been for opium, how handicapped Sir Stamford Raffles [the founder of the colony] would have been if he had not this big revenue to hand […] (Proceedings of Commission 1909, 296).
And, despite having been made the society’s president for a number of years, in 1921, Lim left the society and the colony, to take up an administrative position for a nascent Amoy [now Xiamen] University in Republican China—a move that rendered him “a radical” engaged in a “political and anti-British venture” in the eyes of the colony’s governor (Goh 2010, p. 503). This, importantly, occurred alongside the dissolution of the Straits Philosophical Society. Newspapers reported that Lim’s move was due to his frustrations with a ‘colour-bar,’ despite having been a volunteer in the imperial efforts of the First World War, as well as a (token) Chinese member of the colony’s legislature. In fact, earlier in 1919, Lim resigned and walked out from the legislature (whereof several other members of the Straits Philosophical Society were a part) in a desperate protest at an attempt to discourage the Chinese language being taught in the colony:
In this paper, we have brought their work into contact with the historical archive and with philosophical literature on colonialism, in order to explore two challenges to these functions. We saw that in the face of such challenges, the goals of Marxian thinkers like Frantz Fanon are often more radical in tone than those set out by Habgood-Coote, Ashton, and El Kassar. Counterpublics are there meant to guide counter-violence against the violence of colonial publics, not merely counter-speech, or even failures to comprehend, and they focus on, straightforwardly, materially dissolving colonial publics and a fortiori the extant network of publics (cf. Srinivasan 2016), rather than on reconciling the world views that different publics have produced.
Our paper reveals two lessons for receptive publics. First, if there is a role for receptive publics in the context of colonial struggle, it is not as a mere communicative intermediary for oppressed groups, but as a possible dialectical step that a counterpublic may take towards new modes of socio-material life. Historian Chua Ai Lin observes that despite the fact that “fundamental constitutional change [was] not achieved” with the conciliatory efforts of pre-Second World War intellectuals such as Lim (through failed receptive publics), the “self-confidence and ability to think politically” of “English-educated post-war politicians” who eventually led the decolonisation of Singapore, developed in the “atmosphere of vocal public opinion” of the Straits Chinese counterpublic in the “Asian Anglophone public sphere” (2008, p. 31). More immediately and in a more transnational context, Fermanis notes that, despite the Straits Chinese Magazine’s cessation in 1907, the “reformist agenda and belief in the importance of culture for Chinese identity” espoused by contributors like Straits Philosophical Society members Tan and Lim “was later mobilised by Sun Yat-sen in the service of a more aggressive kind of cultural nationalism and sinification—one that rested on a revitalised Confucianism as a distinctive form of religious modernity, and saw Chinese-language education both as a source of national strength and an effective response to the ongoing threat of western imperialism” (2021, p. 372). However—and this is the second lesson— if such new modes of socio-material life are to be developed alongside, rather than with the expulsion of, Pr, assisting the development of “novel and non-oppressive conceptualisations of [Pr’s] privileged identities” cannot be a mere possibility within receptive publics (as it is for Habgood-Coote et al. 2024), but is rather a necessity.
Whether or not such dialectical transformation then means that deliberative democracy and its very values of liberté, égalité, and fraternité—underpinning the three aspects of the Listening Problem that receptive public are meant to resolve—are up for revaluation lies outside the scope of this paper. As is the question of how much our conclusions carry over to oppressive contexts other than colonial ones. But what, we hope to have made clear is that equal, if not greater, attention must be paid to the material conditions of certain public networks (see, e.g., Harikrishnan 2020), as well as the transformations that systematically accompany the reception of certain counterhegemonic ideas therein.
Sections
"[{\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR66\", \"CR10\", \"CR55\", \"CR18\", \"CR1\", \"CR22\", \"CR71\", \"CR9\", \"CR19\", \"CR61\", \"CR40\", \"CR36\", \"CR35\"], \"section\": \"Introduction\", \"text\": \"In recent years, much scholarship\\u2014philosophical and otherwise\\u2014has focused on problems of political fragmentation, the idea that discourse has become characterised by identity politics, and a pressing need to communicate across different experiences of oppression (e.g. Squires 2002; Burrows 2014; Mothsaathebe 2018; cf. Deumert 2019; Aikin and Talisse 2020; Dutilh Novaes 2020; Tanesini 2020; Broncano et al. 2021; Dommett and Verov\\u0161ek 2021; de Ridder 2021; Jackson and Kreiss 2023; Hannon 2023). Habgood-Coote et al. (2024) have sought to shift the focus of this discussion from speech, and what is said, to listening, or how that speech is received and understood, with the concept of receptive publics.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR64\", \"CR76\"], \"section\": \"Introduction\", \"text\": \"Exploring historical instances of receptive publics, specifically those in colonial contexts, show that being bad at listening is not just a coincidental by-product of oppression, it is often a function of it. In this paper, we will focus on the dynamics of one such instance with the Straits Philosophical Society (1893\\u2013c.1921) as our case study, a coloniser-led learned society in fin-de-si\\u00e8cle Singapore (the administrative capital of the British Straits Settlements) whose object was \\u201cthe critical discussion of questions in Philosophy, History, Theology, Literature, Science, and Art\\u201d (Rules of the Straits Philosophical Society 1910), setting out to draw on \\u201cthe relative powers of the minds of the various nationalities in Singapore\\u201d after \\u201cso many generations in particular countries and callings,\\u201d including the \\u201cdifferent powers of observation developed\\u201d by the \\u201cTamils, Malays, and Chinese\\u201d (Warren 1893, 9).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR35\", \"CR34\"], \"section\": \"The Public Sphere(s)\", \"text\": \"The concept of receptive publics (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024) is a recent addition to the extensive \\u2018public sphere\\u2019 tradition, made famous by J\\u00fcrgen Habermas (1989). As the problems we identify with receptive publics have their roots in this early work, and our proposed solutions build on existing critiques, we will begin by highlighting some key moves in this literature.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"Fn1\"], \"section\": \"The Public Sphere(s)\", \"text\": \"The \\u2018public sphere\\u2019 is the name given to forums for political discourse outside of formal, representative institutions. It encompasses spaces where \\u2018the masses\\u2019 can meet on a supposedly equal footing, in order to discuss issues of common concern, subject the decisions and actions of the authorities to \\u2018public reason\\u2019, and in doing so\\u2014supposedly\\u2014hold them accountable. The public sphere is sometimes referred to more colloquially as meeting in the \\u2018town square\\u2019 or the \\u2018public square\\u2019, in reference to the classical example of the ancient Greek agora\\u2014a marketplace where citizens would meet daily, to discuss social and political issues alongside buying and selling. Habermas himself focused on the function of seventeenth century coffee houses and salons in Europe, and more recently some have referred to social media sites\\u2014in particular the microblogging site Twitter1\\u2014as \\u2018the digital public square\\u2019 to indicate their centrality as a public location of political and social discourse.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR28\", \"CR28\", \"CR23\", \"CR48\", \"CR65\"], \"section\": \"The Public Sphere(s)\", \"text\": \"This concept has been incredibly influential. Nancy Fraser says that \\u201cno attempt to understand the limits of actually existing late capitalist democracy can succeed without in some way or another making use of it\\u201d (Fraser 1990, p.\\u00a057). However, it has also been heavily criticised, most famously by Fraser herself (Fraser 1990. See also, e.g., Eley 1987; Landes 1988; Ryan 1990). She is sensitive to the way that Habermas uses the concept of the public sphere as both a description of actual and historical spaces, and as an ideal that we might strive to create, and how doing this obscures serious limitations with his account as formulated. Namely: Habermas\\u2019s original account gravely underplays the role of oppression in shaping discourse and discourse spaces. When wielding this\\u2014arguably indispensable\\u2014tool it is therefore important to be very clear about how to deploy it critically. Only then can we avoid repeating Habermases\\u2019 mistakes, and adequately illuminate current areas of political discourse.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR28\", \"CR28\", \"CR28\", \"CR28\"], \"section\": \"The Public Sphere(s)\", \"text\": \"Fraser points out that Habermas failed to properly acknowledge how marginalised groups (she focuses on women and the working class) were and are excluded from actually existing public spheres (Fraser 1990, pp.\\u00a059\\u201360). This exclusion limits the range of topics that are considered legitimate for discussion, and so undermines the supposed purpose of holding powerful authorities to account. Similarly, Fraser argued that Habermas failed to recognise the existence of alternative discursive spaces (which she calls subaltern counterpublics) where these marginalised groups could, did, and do meet to discuss issues of common concern to them (Fraser 1990, pp.\\u00a060\\u201361). Her examples of subaltern counterpublics include bourgeois, nineteenth century, women\\u2019s-only philanthropic organisations, which mirrored and sought to influence the main (bourgeois, male) public (Fraser 1990, p.\\u00a061) as well as a late-twentieth century feminist movement in North America, encompassing a \\u201cvariegated array of journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centers, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals, and local meeting places\\u201d (Fraser 1990, p.\\u00a067).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR66\", \"CR66\", \"CR66\"], \"section\": \"The Public Sphere(s)\", \"text\": \"Since then, Catherine Squires (2002), has synthesised the work of other feminist and African-American scholars to make further, important additions to this picture. She points to a wider range of subaltern counterpublics with more diverse functions, emphasising that counterpublics can influence the public sphere through strategies such as boycotts and civil disobedience. She also sketches out two other types of counterpublic space: enclaves are groups that produce counterhegemonic ideas and liberation strategies, but have to hide them from the main public for survival or to avoid sanctions\\u2014for example groups of African Americans organising under and against Jim Crow laws (Squires 2002, pp.\\u00a0448 and 457\\u2013459). And satellites are groups which prefer to be separate, and so distance themselves from the public sphere, in order to maintain a distinct identity, but which may be involved in wider public discourses from time to time. Her example here is of the Nation of Islam (Squires 2002, pp.\\u00a0448 and 463\\u2013464).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR2\", \"CR32\"], \"section\": \"The Public Sphere(s)\", \"text\": \"This leaves us with two important considerations to bear in mind when working with the concept of \\u2018the public sphere\\u2019. First, following Fraser, we should adopt a pluralistic picture of \\u2018the\\u2019 public sphere. Rather than occupying a single domain for social and political discussion, citizens generally find themselves spread between various spheres of debate (also see Asen 2018 on this point). These may differ in their demographic composition [think, for example, of Black Twitter as a distinct counterpublic from \\u2018the\\u2019 main digital public square (Graham and Smith 2016)] but also, importantly\\u2014and as Squires pointed out\\u2014their function. These two points are crucial to understanding both what the role of receptive publics could be, and how\\u2014as we will argue in section E\\u2014that role might be self-defeating, at least in colonial contexts.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR35\"], \"section\": \"Receptive Publics\", \"text\": \"With this groundwork laid, we can now introduce the subject of this paper: receptive publics. Habgood-Coote et al. have analysed the contemporary understanding of the phenomenon of \\u2018cancel culture\\u2019 in terms of multiple publics (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024). They posit that the rise of social media (alongside other social and political changes) has led some groups which previously functioned as enclaves to function instead as counterpublics, and so to go from hiding their counterhegemonic ideas to attempting to use them to influence \\u2018the\\u2019 main (or, more accurately, the range of more dominant) public(s). Prominent examples include the #MeToo movement, and Black Lives Matter.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR35\", \"CR31\", \"CR20\", \"CR6\"], \"section\": \"Receptive Publics\", \"text\": \"Habgood-Coote et al. posit that this shift has contributed to an increase in inter-group friction. This is sometimes\\u2014typically from the perspective of dominant groups\\u2014described as \\u2018cancel culture\\u2019\\u2014(the idea that there are very high social costs for speech which flouts a narrow and recent set of social norms) (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 114). Whilst a range of corresponding effects on marginalised groups have been highlighted by social epistemologists, such as: epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007); epistemic oppression (Dotson 2014); and epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016). Habgood-Coote et al. attribute this state of affairs to a more general problem, one they call \\u2018the Listening Problem\\u2019: a failure to appropriately receive and understand concepts of marginalised and minority groups, due to the fact that public discourse and its supporting institutions are \\u201corganised around the perspectives and interests of dominant and majority groups.\\u201d\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR35\", \"CR35\", \"CR57\", \"CR35\"], \"section\": \"Receptive Publics\", \"text\": \"In an ideal receptive public these problems would not be prohibitive, as the not-saliently-oppressed would be aware of the likelihood of feeling threatened, and would \\u201cput that friction to work\\u201d to develop more nuanced understandings (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 138); they would recognise inequalities in epistemic labour and strive to be responsible, active listeners (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 138; Notess 2019); and they would endeavour to be the kind of audience which \\u201cis willing to put in interpretative work\\u201d and \\u201cpursue strategies of communication that do not assume a basic level of hostility\\u201d (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 139). They hope that conceptualising these publics will support the creation of new ones, or the better maintenance and management of those that already exist.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR35\", \"CR35\"], \"section\": \"Receptive Publics\", \"text\": \"The developmental function of receptive publics is to develop the dominant members\\u2019 understanding of the kind of oppression that the receptive public is focused on, as well as the skills that are needed for receptivity/listening (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 130), whilst the amplificatory function is to support the influencing of dominant publics, by sharing, repeating, and backing up counterhegemonic ideas with other members of these publics (cf. Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 133).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR35\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"The thrust of Fraser\\u2019s critique, above, was that public discourse in \\u201cmodern stratified societies characterised by exclusionary public spheres\\u201d should aim not at a single, unified public, \\u201cbut at a network of connected publics\\u201d (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 127), whilst Squires emphasised that these publics fulfil a diverse range of functions. In conceptualising receptive publics, Habgood-Coote et al. identify an additional type of public which they characterise by the developmental and amplifactory functions explained above, and by the goals of seeking to \\u2018influence the public sphere\\u2019 and \\u2018ameliorate marginalisation in the public sphere.\\u2019 We will suggest that\\u2014at least in some public spheres\\u2014these goals are too conciliatory. This is most clear in the case of colonial publics, i.e. publics that are embedded colonial systems (e.g. the British Empire).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR16\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"For example, Habermas\\u2019 coffee houses, seen as crucial for capitalism\\u2019s triumph over feudalism, required the non-epistemic labour of those \\u201c[w]omen of a less exalted social status [who] found it much easier to enter a coffeehouse than their genteel sisters, not least because the majority of them were there to serve the male patrons\\u201d (Cowan 2005, p.\\u00a0250). And, as media theorist Wendy Willems has recently noted, at the centre of the British Empire, \\u201ccoffee houses and newspapers [in London] were intricately linked to the slave trade and slavery in a number of ways\\u201d:\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR77\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"A third link relates to the way in which the coffee houses acted as spaces where colonial commodities like sugar, which were produced in slave-based economies in the Caribbean, were consumed. [\\u2026] those consuming sugar also were able to do so as a result of the violence that enslaved people were subjected to on the plantations. (Willems 2023, 20\\u201321)\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR5\", \"CR14\", \"CR52\", \"CR26\", \"CR38\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"That is, such institutions, qua sites defined by such commodity consumption, were existentially dependent on products of colonial expropriation (e.g. coffee beans, sugar) that involves, but is not limited to, land-grabbing, the slave (and later coolie) trade, as well as ecological destruction (see Arifin 2023; Combrink 2021, Marquese 2022). The particular social structure of the coffee house\\u2014which Habermas would regard as foundational to the public sphere writ large\\u2014was therefore not only causally constructed by colonial expropriation, being a structure that came into being due to expropriation, but also constitutively constructed by colonial expropriation, being a structure that functioned to uphold the status of white, bourgeois, imperial elites and shaped the emergent ideas that echoed accordingly therein\\u2014such as John Locke\\u2019s notorious positions on land-grabbing and slavery in the British colonisation of America (Farr 2008; cf. Haslanger 2003).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR35\", \"CR30\", \"CR59\", \"Fn2\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"In such situations, the exclusionary nature of such colonial publics is neither due to \\u201cincidental departures from the constitutional ideals of [public] spheres\\u201d nor a result of misrecognising counterpublics (Habgood-Coote et al. 2024, p. 125), as much as they are features of the colonial public itself. As Fraser herself more recently observes, \\u201cthe subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits [with the mediation of a wage contract]\\u201d (Fraser 2016, p.\\u00a0166). Expectedly then, the causal and constitutive construction of (at least some) colonial publics by expropriation may also be found in peripheral spaces within the broader imperial public sphere established by a pan-imperial network of publishers and readers (see Raymond and Moxham 2016).2 Our focus here is on one such case, approaching the Straits Philosophical Society additionally as a receptive public\\u2014albeit ultimately a false one. Since it is unlikely that our readers would be familiar with this particular piece of intellectual history at the colonial peripheries, we will now outline in some detail the historical aspiration and failure of the society as, effectively, a receptive public for Sinophone counterhegemonic ideas in the public sphere of the British Empire.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR50\", \"Fn3\", \"Fn4\", \"CR72\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"Singapore, which became a British colony in 1819, presented a particular politico-epistemic conundrum for its colonial administrators, who founded it with an \\u201c\\u2018enlightened\\u2019 approach to empire,\\u201d drawn from \\u201cEnlightenment ideas of progress and liberalism\\u201d on \\u201ccriticism of the mercantilism of the Dutch\\u201d (Lim & Brophy 2023, p.\\u00a012). The administration\\u2019s commitment to the colony\\u2019s status as a free port, alongside the plantations they set up in both Singapore and the Malayan states (to compete with the Dutch in Southeast Asia), led to an influx of Chinese migrant labourers to the British Straits Settlements\\u2014such that they became the majority ethnic group in Singapore by the 1840s. These Straits Chinese migrants were overwhelmingly wage- or day-labourers (including many \\u2018coolie\\u2019 labourers and sex workers) from Southern China, who did not receive any formal education\\u2014much less an anglophone one. Furthermore, due the Flint Affair in 1759 in China,3 as a consequence of which the Qianlong Emperor banned the teaching of Chinese languages to foreigners on pain of death (until the Treaty of Wanghia in 1844), the initially India-based colonial administration and anglophone merchants neither had the experience nor the linguistic and cultural knowledge to govern and organise this burgeoning population. Colonial administrators and merchants in Singapore thus found themselves having to rely on a small but significant portion of (Peranakan) Chinese migrants who came instead from the surrounding archipelago\\u2014e.g. Malacca, Riau\\u2014with pre-existing capital and an eagerness to learn the English language for trade.4 This group (the babas) effectively became\\u2014and also saw themselves as\\u2014intermediaries for the wider Chinese populace and British colonisers (Teo 2019).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR78\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"Newspaper presses, e.g. The Singapore Free Press and The Straits Times, and publishing houses flourished as a result of a broad commitment by administrators to liberty of the press (after a gagging act in the colonies was lifted in 1835). And with the inward circulation of newspapers like British-based Financial Times and The Guardian, in addition to the outward circulation of local publications within the empire, Singapore quickly became integrated into the imperial public sphere. That said, the local presses were hardly representative of the concerns of the colony\\u2019s largest population for about a century, until the establishment of the Malaya Tribune in 1913, which aimed \\u201c[t]o represent the views and interests of the Asian communities\\u201d (Wong 1951, p.\\u00a02).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR50\", \"CR42\", \"Fn5\", \"CR76\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"We can now understand more of the colonial motivations surrounding the founding of the Straits Philosophical Society in 1893 (see also Lim & Brophy 2023; cf. Jose 1998), as well as the introductory address of the first president of the Straits Philosophical Society,5 quoted at the outset of this paper, that it \\u201cwould be a very worthy and proper object for a Philosophical Society to have in view\\u201d the development of \\u201cthe relative powers of the minds of the various nationalities in Singapore\\u201d (Warren 1893, p.\\u00a010). He specifically highlights an interest in knowing whether the supposition that \\u201cthe Chinaman [sic] is a very accurate and close observer [\\u2026] extends to all matters in everyday life\\u201d and also a desire \\u201cto ascertain how [the Chinese person] first exercises these faculties, i.e. whether they are cultivated by his parents or whether his own innate thriftiness induces their cultivation,\\u201d\\u2014noting further that such an undertaking by the Straits Philosophical Society \\u201cwould be the case of Singapore setting the example of doing what will certainly have to be undertaken at home in a few years\\u201d (ibid., 9\\u201310).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR64\", \"CR50\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"Apart from the core members of the Straits Philosophical Society, the society otherwise had a pan-imperial membership and readership: originators of essays and criticisms in the extant record of the society\\u2019s proceedings include residents in not only Singapore but also London, Edinburgh, Ceylon, South Africa, and the rest of\\u00a0British Malaya. This was organised by an elected Executive Committee, consisting of \\u201ca President, a Secretary, and three other Members who [were] elected annually\\u201d (Rules of the Straits Philosophical Society 1910, p.\\u00a01). And while in its early years \\u201cdiscussions following the talks were designed to institutionalize \\u2018freedom of thought and expression,\\u2019 outside of the gaze of the colony\\u2019s developing public sphere,\\u201d contributions were reproduced in print elsewhere: e.g., with an anthology of earlier contributions compiled by the society\\u2019s then-president in 1913 or with \\u201cproceedings of subsequent years 1911\\u20131916 [\\u2026] made available in pamphlet form by the Methodist Publishing House of Singapore\\u201d (Lim and Brophy 2023, pp.\\u00a05\\u20136). Contributions between the Straits Philosophical Society and the Straits branch of the Royal Asiatic Society also sometimes overlapped.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR43\", \"CR39\", \"CR27\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"Given the aforementioned context and a broadly liberal orientation of the colonial administration (Jose 2010), that the first president of the Straits Philosophical Society would aspire for it to effectively become a bona fide space that was particularly receptive to the epistemic contributions of the Chinese population\\u2014i.e. a receptive public\\u2014is thus unsurprising. In fact, of the members (exclusively men) constituting the society throughout its years, only two core members were Chinese: Tan Teck Soon (1859\\u20131922) and Lim Boon Keng (1869\\u20131957). Both men, each internationally reputed then for their knowledge of Chinese philosophy and culture, were simultaneously involved in a broader Straits Chinese counterpublic through various community initiatives, such as the Amateur Drawing Association or the creation of or contributions to the Straits Chinese Magazine. The latter was a quarterly anglophone periodical that not only centred the voices of the Straits Chinese but also included contributions by their colonisers in an effort to promote mutual understanding (Holden 1998; Fermanis 2021). Contributions by the Straits Philosophical Society were also sometimes reprinted in the magazine.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR75\", \"CR21\", \"CR64\", \"CR12\"], \"section\": \"The Expropriative Nature of Colonial Public Spheres\", \"text\": \"However, it should be underscored that the construction of the Straits Philosophical Society as a public space in 1893 was also due to the wealth accumulated by the colonial administration in the preceding decades\\u2014most notably through the opium trade which was undergirded by the \\u2018coolie\\u2019 trade. As historian Carl Trocki notes, \\u201c[i]t is difficult to see how the British could have taken control of the commerce of India, China, and Southeast Asia in less than half a century without opium\\u201d as \\u201cthe major form of economic leverage\\u201d (Trocki 1990, p.\\u00a0221). Such expropriation was, furthermore, often a self-conscious enterprise: \\u201cAnglophone capitalists understood the close connection of contraband opium to Chinese captive labor, cynically linking them as \\u2018poison and pigs\\u2019 [\\u2026]\\u2014their cash cows\\u201d (Driscoll 2021, p.\\u00a05). And as set out in its rules, the society would meet monthly for dinner in a hotel\\u2014and the only extant photograph of the society locates them at the table of the most prestigious Singapore Club, a site that gathered the chief economic and political players in the colony (Makepeace et al. 1921, p.\\u00a0302). Moreover, membership was restricted to graduates from recognised (Euroamerican) universities, \\u201c[f]ellows of a recognised Learned or Scientific Society,\\u201d or otherwise deemed by the society\\u2019s members to be \\u201cof distinguished merit [\\u2026] in any branch of knowledge\\u201d (Rules\\n1910, 2). Coupled with a $5 entrance fee, $25 annual fees (increased from $15 in 1893) and fines for absentees, at a time when average real wage was $93\\u2013111 among a predominantly impoverished population (Choy and Sugimoto 2018), the makeup of participants was restricted to a particular socio-economic class. Society discussions often reflected this: for example, the withholding of applying liberal principles to \\u2018oriental dependencies\\u2019 or negative eugenics.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR4\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"Both Tan and Lim often had to work to temper their tones when criticising the colonial administration\\u2014with an eloquence and mannerism befitting of an \\u2018English gentleman.\\u2019 (On rare occasions, this temperance slipped to deleterious effects on the discussion.) Yet, Tan\\u2019s consistent attempts to bring the grievances and contributions of the disadvantaged Straits Chinese population in Singapore (e.g., women sex workers and labourers, whom he passionately defends elsewhere) to the attention of the colonial administrators in audience still often went unappreciated. Tan\\u2019s essay analysing Chinese local trade (now cited by historians as an authoritative contemporary source) was even denounced by his critic as unworthy of the society\\u2019s time altogether (Allinson 1901).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR70\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"Criticisms were also launched by Tan of their colonial interlocutors\\u2019 \\u201cfeeble and spasmodic attempts [\\u2026]to understand and comprehend the natives who surround [them] on every side\\u201d (Tan 1902, p. 63): such as the colonial members\\u2019 avoidance of presenting any essay on Chinese philosophy, religion, and culture (except one time, in the absence of both Tan and Lim). Criticisms and discussions on these topics (almost always prefaced with protracted disclaimers about their ignorance and inexperience) were otherwise only prompted by the two Chinese members\\u2014and were often only tangentially related. Lim was recorded responding to the discussion following his essay on \\u201cThe Influence of Religion in China,\\u201d wherein his interlocutors meandered about concerns of the religious beliefs of the babas, the incapacities of the Chinese student of morality, and the Christian deity:\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR60\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"He [Lim] had advanced a number of views in hopes of obtaining additional information regarding the influence of foreign religions upon each other in early times and regarding the development of religion in China, but the discussion had centred round other points, and no information had been given to elucidate the question in which he was most interested. (Wilkinson 1895, 74)\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR63\", \"CR74\", \"CR79\", \"CR42\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"Moreover, Lim\\u2019s attempt to introduce the idea of a \\u201ctendency to over-legislation\\u201d in an essay was summarily rebuffed by his critic as not only non-existent in the colony but nonsensical\\u2014with the latter asserting that \\u201cwe want more legislation, and less consideration for individual rights\\u201d (Ritchie 1906, p.\\u00a080). Meanwhile, a similar critique made by Tan concerning British discriminatory restrictions on higher offices in the Chinese-controlled Imperial Maritime Custom Service was met with outrage and disbelief at the lack of appreciation for the Empire\\u2019s efforts to improve the world (Thomas 1907, see also Wilson 2025). The critic of Tan\\u2019s aforementioned essay on Chinese local trade would even conclude with a dehumanising (yet common) comparison between Chinese people and dogs. The reception of Tan and Lim\\u2019s counterhegemonic ideas within the space of the Straits Philosophical Society was thus continually frustrated by the defensiveness of their interlocutors with respect to the colonial situation (cf. Jose 1998).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR17\", \"CR17\", \"CR46\", \"CR44\"], \"section\": \"Developmental Challenges\", \"text\": \"With (Da), Pr would risk either defanging counterhegemonic ideas as they assimilate such ideas into their extant, hegemonic conceptual scheme [i.e. a Type 2 Failure]. This is a bigger problem than Habgood-Coote et al. noted when they attended to the appropriation (or expropriation) of counterhegemonic ideas. Often, counterhegemonic ideas target fundamental hegemonic ideals\\u2014thought to be precisely the animating ideals of expropriation\\u2014that, should these fundamental ideals not be unseated, necessitates incoming ideas to be appropriated accordingly. Tommy Curry has noted an \\u201cepistemic convergence [of African American philosophy] with white philosophical traditions,\\u201d with \\u201chistoric Black thinkers [made] safe for white consumption by reading the importance of race and the centrality of culture out of Black thought\\u201d\\u2014e.g. \\u201cW.E.B. Dubois is read as the Black Hegel, the Black James, the Black Dewey, and Frantz Fanon as a Black Sartre or Husserl\\u201d (Curry 2011, 315\\u20136). As Curry observes, following Sylvia Wynter, this is due to how, \\u201cinsofar as Blacks are human or claim their humanity,\\u201d they must always appeal to an \\u201calways already\\u201d fixed ideal of \\u201cEuropean humanity believed to be universal\\u201d which \\u201cBlack\\u2019s humanity\\u201d are presumed as \\u201canalogous with [\\u2026] regardless of its anthropological assumptions\\u201d (Curry 2011, p.\\u00a0323, emphasis added). Similarly, attempts to comprehend Confucianism and Daoism by colonial interlocutors in the Straits Philosophical Society often relied on reductive comparisons that mapped Chinese philosophers too quickly onto those with which they were more familiar, such as \\u201cConfucius [being] the Aristotle, [Laozi] the Plato of China\\u201d (Lamont 1895, p.\\u00a066; cf. Kirloskar-Steinbach and Kalmanson 2021).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR69\", \"Fn6\", \"CR27\"], \"section\": \"Developmental Challenges\", \"text\": \"Notably, Tan and Lim themselves also often engaged in a similar comparatism when expounding on Chinese-philosophical concepts to an anglophone audience\\u2014coloniser or colonised. Tan, for example, in introducing Chinese religions to his interlocutors, described \\u2018Dao\\u2019 \\u201cin Kantian phraseology\\u201d as \\u201cthe category of the \\u2018a priori\\u2019 or the \\u2018purely formal\\u2019,\\u201d albeit still being careful to distinguish between the \\u201cmore abstract and intellectual\\u201d nature of the \\u201cEuropean philosopher\\u2019s representation\\u201d and the \\u201cmore concrete and objective\\u201d one of \\u201cthe Chinese\\u201d (Tan 1912, p.\\u00a098). Characterising Daoism as \\u201ca system of transcendental philosophy,\\u201d Tan further admitted that its \\u201contological speculations are considered by some to be Hegelian in their main tendency\\u201d (ibid.).6 As literary scholar Porscha Fermanis notes in her examination of Tan and Lim\\u2019s contributions to the Straits Chinese Magazine, \\u201cLim and Tan [saw] comparatism as a means of empowering Chinese civilisation within an increasingly racialised imperial world-system\\u201d (2021, p.\\u00a0361). This, however, remains in tension with how \\u201cthe magazine is conventionally read as an apology for both British and Chinese imperialism,\\u201d where \\u201cloyalism and participation in the colonial public sphere is seen as false consciousness, at odds with the more authentic forms of radicalism associated with workers and peasants in the kampongs.\\u201d (p.\\u00a0371).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR24\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali\\u2019s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods [1911\\u20131914 at Harvard], left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after\\u2014and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys\\u2014lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle [1910\\u20131916 at Harvard, Sorbonne, Oxford]. And I came to the conclusion\\u2014seeing also that the \\u2018influence\\u2019 of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding\\u2014that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do. (Eliot 1934, 40\\u201341, emphasis added)\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR49\"], \"section\": \"Developmental Challenges\", \"text\": \"While it is unclear whether a similar psychological threat presented itself to the unreceptive colonisers of the Straits Philosophical Society, the fear of \\u2018forgetting how to think and feel as X\\u2019 was not foreign as a concept to them. Lim made an inverse point about the cost of Christianisation for Chinese people in his debut essay, that \\u201cthe missionary has not sufficiently realised [\\u2026] a Chinaman can scarcely be a Christian in China without becoming almost completely denationalised,\\u201d going further to claim also that \\u201c[t]he very social fabric of China must be broken up if the Chinese as a whole become Christian\\u201d (Lim 1895, p.\\u00a062). Lim himself would have been intimately familiar with Eliot\\u2019s \\u2018practical as well as sentimental reasons,\\u2019 having been baptised in a church during his medical studies in Edinburgh just a couple of years earlier\\u2014though publicly moving away from Christianity in favour of Confucianism altogether after this essay.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR68\", \"CR27\"], \"section\": \"Developmental Challenges\", \"text\": \"Yet, it is clear that some degree of commensurability between the ideals of the sympathetic members of a receptive public who are not saliently oppressed and the ideals of the saliently oppressed members is a condition of the very possibility of a receptive public. This was a position otherwise affirmed by Tan and Lim in their efforts to communicate their ideas. In the former\\u2019s 1898 review of Paul Carus\\u2019 Buddhism and Its Christian Critics for the Straits Chinese Magazine, for example, Tan remarked on an overall progression in the broader European reception of Chinese ideas: from the translations of \\u201cthe French savants Abel Remusat [Jean-Pierre Abel-R\\u00e9musat] and Stanislas Julien\\u201d which formed \\u201ca new and more favourable opinion [\\u2026] as regards the utility of Chinese literature and the capabilities of the Chinese race\\u201d; to \\u201cthe basic elements of Chinese civilization [being] revealed and to some extent appreciated\\u201d by \\u201cscholars such as Legge, [Samuel] Beal, [Thomas] Watters, and [Herbert A.] Giles\\u201d; and to \\u201cthe philosophic studies of scholars of the New World [such as Carus]\\u201d providing \\u201cthe fairest estimate of Chinese characteristics but also [\\u2026] the deepest insight into Chinese faith and beliefs\\u201d\\u2014the last of which Tan hoped would \\u201ctranscend all racial distinctions and eventually re-enlighten even ourselves [i.e., the Straits Chinese]\\u201d (Tan 1898, p. 31; cf. Fermanis 2021).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR15\", \"Fn7\", \"CR62\"], \"section\": \"Developmental Challenges\", \"text\": \"However, what was clear that would have undergirded (Db) among some members within the Straits Philosophical Society who were not saliently oppressed was a dominant assumption of a categorical incommensurability that echoed Kipling\\u2019s sentiment that \\u2018East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.\\u2019 We can find different kinds of such incommensurability articulated: e.g., foundational incommensurability, where \\u201cthe foundations that traditions use to make sense of the world around them are so different from one another that members of these traditions cannot understand one another\\u201d; linguistic incommensurability, where \\u201cphilosophical traditions from different cultures depend on distinctive languages that cannot be translated into one another\\u201d (Connolly 2023, p.\\u00a072).7 The 1907 presidential address to the society, by a then-newly elected Henry N. Ridley, put forward a position of foundational incommensurability between \\u2018East\\u2019 and \\u2018West,\\u2019 coupled with a more-than-tacit declaration of his preference for his \\u2018own\\u2019 tradition and ideals. Ridley noted that while \\u201cEast and West are meeting on physical grounds\\u201d and \\u201c[the Orientals] may graft the best parts of the Western civilization on the best of the Eastern, and so further the development of the human race\\u201d (with the address neglecting the possibility of the converse), \\u201cOriental and Occidental will remain distinct to the end of time\\u201d (1907, pp.\\u00a011\\u201313).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR27\"], \"section\": \"Developmental Challenges\", \"text\": \"And, just a decade before, Straits Philosophical Society member Archibald Lamont (1864\\u20131933) gave voice to a concern for linguistic incommensurability in a direct contribution of his to the Straits Chinese Magazine. (Whether Lamont actually believed the position he put forward is unclear from the contribution.) Lamont was a graduate in ethics from the University of Glasgow, a Presbyterian minister, and had been Tan\\u2019s collaborator on the 1894 novel Bright Celestials: A Chinaman at Home and Abroad, as well as The Daily Advertiser, which they co-owned and ran together in the same year. Lamont\\u2019s contribution to the Straits Chinese Magazine was a fictional dialogue between European & Straits Chinese spiritualists and the ghosts of Shakespeare & Confucius in a s\\u00e9ance, in which \\u201cShakespeare stands as a symbol for ethnocentrism on a grand scale, as well as for the ways in which western literary classics lose their meaning and value outside of a European context\\u201d and \\u201cConfucius fares little better\\u201d (Fermanis 2021, p.\\u00a0369). Fermanis notes that \\u201cthe story ends without any sense of agreement between the Straits Chinese and their British friends, pointing to the incommensurability of their religious beliefs and their positions as coloniser and colonised, as well as to the failure of either Shakespeare or Confucius, as representative figures of a western and eastern canon, to adequately speak to or reconcile those positions\\u201d (ibid.).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR53\"], \"section\": \"Developmental Challenges\", \"text\": \"Both these horns, (Da) and (Db), thus result in what Filipa Melo Lopes calls \\u201cmeaning vertigo\\u201d with respect to Pr\\u2019s social being, which is a \\u201cperception of a vertiginous and unsettling emptiness at the level of social meaning\\u201d that, \\u201cwhile [it] may not exactly track reality, it nevertheless constitutes a very real anxiety\\u201d that may prompt backlash on the part of Pr (Melo Lopes 2019, p.\\u00a02531).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"Fn8\", \"CR80\"], \"section\": \"Amplificatory Challenges\", \"text\": \"Consider, for example, how the aforementioned novel Brights Celestials by Straits Philosophical Society members Lamont and Tan was received in the imperial metropole of London (published under the pseudonym \\u2018John Coming Chinaman\\u2019 by Lamont). The novel followed the life of Tek Chiu, a \\u2018coolie\\u2019-turned-public-official from his hometown in Southern China, through Dutch Java, to Singapore, aiming to illuminate Chinese life both within China and abroad in the colonies, specifically in the context of Christian missionary efforts\\u2014unique at the time for offering such considerations through a Chinese narrative perspective. Unlike a conventional novel, its chapters were peppered with sociological observations focusing on topics under the British such as dehumanising practice of the \\u2018coolie\\u2019 trade, gender inequality in Chinese culture, Chinese secret societies, the uses and abuses of opium, and the transnational flesh trade. Lamont and Tan\\u2019s attempt to amplify a Chinese perspective on these concerns within the broader colonial public sphere, however, was received more as a cultural curiosity or fascinating postcard: it had a mixed reception among metropolitan reviewers, praised largely for its unique selling point, but panned for its style and relative optimism about the prospects of Christian missions among the Chinese.8 Further, between 1904 to 1910, the British Conservative government imported more than 60,000 \\u2018coolie\\u2019 labourers to work the gold mines in Witwatersrand to recuperate losses from the Second Boer War (see Yap and Man 1996). The subsequent backlash over this policy, which contributed strongly to the Liberal Party\\u2019s landslide victory over the Conservatives, was split between outrage over \\u2018Yellow Peril\\u2019 and \\u2018Chinese slavery\\u2019\\u2014the latter being more likely due to humanitarian reports of how Chinese labourers were treated rather than the efforts of the two Straits Philosophical Society members.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR56\", \"CR41\", \"CR50\"], \"section\": \"Amplificatory Challenges\", \"text\": \"While not involving the \\u2018violent overthrow\\u2019 of oppressors, we find a similar fragmentation of the extant public sphere to have occurred with certain members of the Straits Philosophical Society. Lamont returned to Scotland in 1896 (or 1897). It is unclear what exactly motivated Lamont to leave Singapore, between the withdrawal of support for his educational efforts in Singapore by the English Presbyterian Mission and his undertaking a BD (see Mouton 1989; Johnson 2001). But Lamont\\u2019s more liberal stand against racial prejudice was also incongruent with the colony being increasingly enamoured with racial hierarchy and the authoritarian approach in Dutch Java, contra the colony\\u2019s broader liberal commitments\\u2014as expressed by some colonial administrators who were also society members, e.g. the aforementioned Ridley (see Lim & Brophy 2023). Reportedly, for Lamont,\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR56\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"Race prejudice or colour question was not in the dictionary of his life. He mixed with all sections freely and his labour ideals marked the feeling of generosity, of sympathy and of uplift towards the working man of any class or creed. (\\u201cThe late Mr Lamont\\u201d 1933, 193; quoted in Mouton 1989, 66)\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR58\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"Besides, fancy what Singapore would have done if it had not been for opium, how handicapped Sir Stamford Raffles [the founder of the colony] would have been if he had not this big revenue to hand [...] (Proceedings of Commission 1909, 296).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR33\"], \"section\": \"Amplificatory Challenges\", \"text\": \"And, despite having been made the society\\u2019s president for a number of years, in 1921, Lim left the society and the colony, to take up an administrative position for a nascent Amoy [now Xiamen] University in Republican China\\u2014a move that rendered him \\u201ca radical\\u201d engaged in a \\u201cpolitical and anti-British venture\\u201d in the eyes of the colony\\u2019s governor (Goh 2010, p. 503). This, importantly, occurred alongside the dissolution of the Straits Philosophical Society. Newspapers reported that Lim\\u2019s move was due to his frustrations with a \\u2018colour-bar,\\u2019 despite having been a volunteer in the imperial efforts of the First World War, as well as a (token) Chinese member of the colony\\u2019s legislature. In fact, earlier in 1919, Lim resigned and walked out from the legislature (whereof several other members of the Straits Philosophical Society were a part) in a desperate protest at an attempt to discourage the Chinese language being taught in the colony:\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR67\"], \"section\": \"Troubleshooting Receptive Publics\", \"text\": \"In this paper, we have brought their work into contact with the historical archive and with philosophical literature on colonialism, in order to explore two challenges to these functions. We saw that in the face of such challenges, the goals of Marxian thinkers like Frantz Fanon are often more radical in tone than those set out by Habgood-Coote, Ashton, and El Kassar. Counterpublics are there meant to guide counter-violence against the violence of colonial publics, not merely counter-speech, or even failures to comprehend, and they focus on, straightforwardly, materially dissolving colonial publics and a fortiori the extant network of publics (cf. Srinivasan 2016), rather than on reconciling the world views that different publics have produced.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR13\", \"CR27\", \"CR35\"], \"section\": \"Troubleshooting Receptive Publics\", \"text\": \"Our paper reveals two lessons for receptive publics. First, if there is a role for receptive publics in the context of colonial struggle, it is not as a mere communicative intermediary for oppressed groups, but as a possible dialectical step that a counterpublic may take towards new modes of socio-material life. Historian Chua Ai Lin observes that despite the fact that \\u201cfundamental constitutional change [was] not achieved\\u201d with the conciliatory efforts of pre-Second World War intellectuals such as Lim (through failed receptive publics), the \\u201cself-confidence and ability to think politically\\u201d of \\u201cEnglish-educated post-war politicians\\u201d who eventually led the decolonisation of Singapore, developed in the \\u201catmosphere of vocal public opinion\\u201d of the Straits Chinese counterpublic in the \\u201cAsian Anglophone public sphere\\u201d (2008, p.\\u00a031). More immediately and in a more transnational context, Fermanis notes that, despite the Straits Chinese Magazine\\u2019s cessation in 1907, the \\u201creformist agenda and belief in the importance of culture for Chinese identity\\u201d espoused by contributors like Straits Philosophical Society members Tan and Lim \\u201cwas later mobilised by Sun Yat-sen in the service of a more aggressive kind of cultural nationalism and sinification\\u2014one that rested on a revitalised Confucianism as a distinctive form of religious modernity, and saw Chinese-language education both as a source of national strength and an effective response to the ongoing threat of western imperialism\\u201d (2021, p.\\u00a0372). However\\u2014and this is the second lesson\\u2014 if such new modes of socio-material life are to be developed alongside, rather than with the expulsion of, Pr, assisting the development of \\u201cnovel and non-oppressive conceptualisations of [Pr\\u2019s] privileged identities\\u201d cannot be a mere possibility within receptive publics (as it is for Habgood-Coote et al. 2024), but is rather a necessity.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12358328\", \"pmid\": \"\", \"reference_ids\": [\"CR37\"], \"section\": \"Troubleshooting Receptive Publics\", \"text\": \"Whether or not such dialectical transformation then means that deliberative democracy and its very values of libert\\u00e9, \\u00e9galit\\u00e9, and fraternit\\u00e9\\u2014underpinning the three aspects of the Listening Problem that receptive public are meant to resolve\\u2014are up for revaluation lies outside the scope of this paper. As is the question of how much our conclusions carry over to oppressive contexts other than colonial ones. But what, we hope to have made clear is that equal, if not greater, attention must be paid to the material conditions of certain public networks (see, e.g., Harikrishnan 2020), as well as the transformations that systematically accompany the reception of certain counterhegemonic ideas therein.\"}]"
Metadata
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