Week 3 RAT

Instructions: Each question is worth four points. You should assign a total of total of 4 points for each question, but can divide the four points amongst multiple alternatives. Your score will be the points assigned for each question corresponding to the correct alternative (i.e. the best answer(s) among the four options).

1.An imagined community, i.e. a nation,


 * A. statements B and C are true

B. is in charge of its doings, political and legal structures, and welfare of its citizens

C. has finite, albeit elastic, borders or boundaries

D. is wholly specific and unified culturally

2.Which is false?

Community or fraternity


 * A. erases instances of inequality and exploitation

B. makes it possible for countless people to die willingly in its service

C. is always conceived as deep and horizontal

D. none of the statements are false

3.Imagined communities, e.g. nations,

A. all of the statements are true

B. were invented where they did not exist

C. grew out of and replaced religious and dynastic realms


 * D. represented a new way of apprehending everyday experience of the world

4.Which is false?

Imagined communities, e.g. nations,

A. become more well-defined through power struggles with neighbours

B. require communications technologies to produce meanings which construct and sustain them


 * C. offer a symbolic sense of belonging and fellowship but are invented out of nothing

D. are represented through coherent images and memories of a people's origins and distinctiveness

5.Imagined communities arose and developed

A. upon the development of increasingly rapid communication technologies

B. following discoveries in the secular sciences

C. with the ubiquity of reproducible, commoditised communications artefacts


 * D. all of the statements are true

6.Which is false?

The imagining of the nation is possible because


 * A. none of the statements are false

B. of an understanding of the steady, onward movement of homogenous, shared time

C. of confidence that ‘consumption’ is being replicated simultaneously by countless, anonymous others

D. fiction seeps quietly and continuously into everyday life

7.Singaporean national identity

A. appropriates and reconstitutes Western modernity


 * B. all of the statements are true

C. unsettles Western hegemony by questioning its moral worth

D. is involuntary, inauthentic and unavoidably hybridized

8.Singaporean identity

A. is inherent, stable and unchanging


 * B. statements C and D are true

C. is a (colonial) construct, both non-Western and always-already Westernised

D. attempts to provide a solution to the ambivalence of its origins through self-Orientalisation

9.Orientalism is the cultural Othering of the ‘East’ by the ‘West’


 * A. all of the statements are true

B. in order to define the ‘West’ via binary oppositions and what it is not

C. is both unsettled and reinforced through the articulation of Singaporean identity

D. in order to provide the West with a sense of moral legitimacy

10.Singapore offers an idea of ‘Asianness’ that


 * A. all of the statements are true

B. is synthetic and artificial

C. is promoted as flexible and particular

D. allows the deconstruction of discourses such as ‘West’ and ‘Asia’