Image and the Total Utopia: Scaling Raciolinguistic Belonging in Singapore

This dissertation is an ethnography of the image of Singapore: a category through which differently positioned individuals and groups reflect on, contest, and reimagine the kind of place Singapore is and what it means to be Singaporean. I consider the image of Singapore not as an objective thing, but as an arena of social life (Gal 2018) and site of ideological work (Irvine and Gal 2019) at which voices and interests are materialized, made recognizable and repeatable across contexts. The interactions on which I focus get staged reflexively at a range of scales, from the intra-local to the global. I examine the differential production of raciolinguistic (non-)belonging in multilingual, multiracial, multicultural Singapore amid rising anxieties over the changing character of locality (Chan and Siddique 2018), over perceived threats of foreign interference, and over a hegemonic global (but largely Euro-American) gaze imagined to judge Singapore on the world stage. I consider who is or is not perceived by default to belong to the nation-state on account of their linguistic abilities, which are linked in turn to categories of racialized, group-based personhood. I track various projects through which the image of Singapore gets constructed and contested across online and offline interactional sites and media artifacts—produced in language-educational settings, national rituals, artistic productions, and informal interactions—to identify the strategies by which actors anticipate and respond to various audiences (Rutherford 2012; Alatas 1975) when constructing images of Singapore. Such audiences do not preexist their invocation in interaction, but are indexed through anticipatory labor that responds to expected (or actual) challenges to one’s own or others’ belonging. The arguments that I make throughout the dissertation’s chapters focus on two concerns. The first analyzes anxieties over the English language, both as it is localized and stigmatized through “Singlish” (or Singaporean Englishes; Wee 2018), and as it is externalized as a forever-foreign code whose standards are linked to global structures of malleable and aspirational, yet unattainable, whiteness seen to lie beyond Singapore. The second concern analyzes anxieties over “Mother Tongue” languages as a necessary and essential, but still partible dimension of racialized belonging in the Southeast Asian island city-state. Crucially, the construction of group-based (non-)belonging is imagined by default as a transparently interpretable feature of reality—as something one merely looks at or listens for when determining who does (not) belong to the image of Singapore—rather than as a structured function of aesthetic textualities (Nakassis 2019) made experienceable via sociohistorical and institutional co-naturalizations (Rosa and Flores 2017) of language, race, and belonging. I analyze these two concerns to understand how Singapore gets positioned and experienced as a total utopia: a place where individual possibilities are regimented and delimited, but where desired alternatives can still be imagined and pursued (Bahrawi 2011; 2016). In this way, I show how totalizing projects for constructing the image of Singapore are never total, even if they are experienced as such by those who labor within and alongside them