Postcolonial Trauma and Development in Asia: Psychoanalysis and the Neoliberal Political Economy

This book dismantles conventional political and economic thinking to explore the Asian Economic Miracle as an outcome of the traumas of postcolonial economic development. This book argues that these unconscious anxieties underpin the postcolonial and neoliberal political economy, producing a particular libidinal economy that is fixated on the maintenance of dignity and the avoidance of humiliation.

Through the cases of Singapore and Malaysia, a psychoanalytic perspective provides new insights into racialized and masculine unconscious anxieties around survival, dignity and humiliation. Sioh traces the development of the postcolonial state, charting the shift from social power being rooted in military to economic success. The complex relationship between the political economy of neoliberal austerity and psychic humiliation is explored, and the ways in which East Asian economic decision-making has served not just as an economic, but a cultural battleground, to define development and underdevelopment.