Summary

A nuanced understanding of how media matter in the diverse articulations of multiculturalism across the globe requires one to have a transnational sensibility. This is a scholarly disposition that entails being attuned to the role that different media platforms and genres play not only in how racial hierarchies of different societies are articulated, but also in how these hierarchies get entangled with each other. Although the literature about media and multiculturalism is already well established, it is often situated in the context of the West. These works understandably tend to be concerned with the mediation of multicultural issues that are most relevant to their situation, such as the legacies of empire and of settler colonialism. A transnational sensibility consequently necessitates an expansion of current discussions about media and multiculturalism beyond the West. Doing so can allow for a better understanding of how media get entwined with the distinct issues of cultural diversity that have emerged from a wider range of contexts. It also opens up an important vista from which to explore how the mediation of multicultural issues in different parts of the world might be linked to each other, and sometimes intimately so.

A productive site to think through such a transnational sensibility to media and cultural diversity is the global cities of the Southeast Asian region. These places are exemplary of postcolonial multiculturalisms that are distinct from the kind of multiculturalism that can be found in the global cities of West. This article consequently juxtaposes two urban contexts that represent divergent approaches toward the mediation of colonially rooted cultural diversity. One is the city-state of Singapore, where there are overt public policies about managing plurality. The second is the Philippines capital of Metropolitan Manila (henceforth, Manila), where there is a general elision of public talk about plurality. The article takes a comparative lens to these two cities, assessing how their different mediations of postcolonial multiculturalism are entangled with broader global dynamics, including with each other.