Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel

Abstract

Celebrated as a leading luxury hotel in the world, the Raffles Hotel stands as a monument to Singapore’s status as a global city of commerce. The century‐old Hotel also represents successful postcolonial heritage conservation. Drawing from archival and published sources, I analyze the Hotel as a changing cultural form in the historical transformation of Singapore by the circuits of global capital, from imperial capitalism, through the postcolonial development of national capitalism, to the current phase of neoliberal globalization. Together with developments in the surrounding urban heart of Singapore, Raffles Hotel is a space of cultural disjuncture transfiguring through the three ages of capital. I argue that the Hotel took the dominant form of white male domesticity in British Singapore, nostalgic authenticity in the postcolonial period and cosmopolitan hybridity in the current global phase. In each phase, the form elided the racial, class, gender and sexual contradictions of transnational capital and produced social relations of relative mobility. It shows that the global city is not made by transnational capital but by the developmental state harnessing economic flows for global city‐making with the ensuing spatial‐cultural politics in tow.