Singapore, the state, and decolonial spatiality

Abstract

The proposition that Singapore is a successful Asian model of urban culture and political economy is a discomforting one. I had thought this was a postcolonial problem of hybrid identity making and political practice. But in my attempts to study Singapore society, from street carnivals to popular religion, I have ended up facing the state’s knowing rationalizations in the discursive materials and material space itself. When I focus on the state and its archive, I end up looking at society and its culture transcribed, rationalized and spatialized. Our epistemic blind spot in Asian cultural studies is the coloniality of the state and its spatiality. Singapore is exceptional because the state took the urban logics of Asian developmentalism to its conclusion, flattening rich cultural lifeworlds to spaces of bare life so as to reconstruct society in the state’s own modern imaginary of the good life. The state continues to do this in spite of the deterritorialization of globalization. The Singapore model offers the promise of remaining colonial and territorializing. In response, we need new methods of decolonial spatiality involving the urban grassroots and the intellectual strike.