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Abstract
Since the 1990s, the island city state of Singapore has been experiencing a “Renaissance” of art and screened media production after decades of a relative dearth of local involvement in these practices. In the decades since, the Singaporean state has pursued a program of development, attempting to capture and sustain the growth of local creative production to build the Singaporean media industry. Approaching this project with locally-entrenched forms of Singaporean development like master plans and blueprints, Singaporean state agencies often refer to the goal of these projects as the creation of a vibrant media industry or city. Multiple initiatives derive from these plans. These include large-scale infrastructure projects like the construction of a media campus called Mediapolis, institutional support for events like the Singapore Media Festival, and financial support for individuals and their media texts. This sustained, wide-ranging investment into the growth of the media industries contrasts with the pre-1990s Singaporean state paradigm, which emphasized a pragmatic approach to Singapore’s survival in which there was no space for the creative industries. This dissertation examines the forms of value attached to modern media industry development. It acknowledges but looks beyond common explanations for media industries, including both economic references to contribution to gross domestic product and political references to soft power. Thus, the dissertation takes seriously the state’s goal of creating a “vibrant” media industry and city, asking after the meanings and investment implied through the use of vibrant to consider creativity and liveliness as values attached to media industry development in Singapore. Cultural and linguistic anthropology has theorized the concept of animation as the projection of human qualities, including liveliness, onto and through non-human entities. The notion of vibrancy motivates the dissertation’s adoption and centering of the concept of animation as a conceptual lens to characterize and analyze the project of media industry development. This problem space was pursued through research done through three methods: 1) in-person ethnographic fieldwork conducted principally at events of the Singapore Media Festival; 2) virtual ethnography examining how Singaporean media professionals gathered in online spaces during the conditions of the global coronavirus pandemic; and 3) analysis of contemporary and historical Singaporean media texts. The dissertation contributes to the anthropological analysis of media production by scaling the concept of animation to the media industry, considering a media industry as an entity that needs to be animated in order to creatively produce media texts in turn. It theorizes the developing media industry as a deficient animator, an entity that fails to create vibrant media texts as evaluated both by Singaporean interlocutors in ever-pervasive negative laments and by non-Singaporean interlocutors through their constructions of hierarchies of national media industries. These narratives of deficiency create the conditions which necessitate the development of the Singaporean media industry. Despite this perceived deficiency, the dissertation argues that the media industry is still intimately involved in the animation of several categories of Singaporean life, most principally race and nationalism.