Renationalisation of space in everyday life in Singapore

As globalisation becomes more and more familiar in our everyday lives, one readily visible phenomenon is the increasing number of migrants from outside the borders of nation states. This influx of migrants inevitably makes societies more complicated racially and culturally, and a ‘multi-racial’ or ‘multi-cultural’ society is no longer the monopoly of migrant societies such as the United States or Australia. This spread of multi-racial and multi-cultural societies in the world, however, does not mean that we have achieved racial and cultural co-existence (among nationals, and needless to say between host society and migrants) without hierarchies. In the face of a constant flow of migrants, both the host states and host societies need to control migrants, to ensure that migrants will co-exist with the host society as the host society wishes. Hierarchy and difference need to be created and maintained by the host society to control the influx of migrants in their everyday life. This paper explores how Singapore society draws a border between itself and female migrant domestic workers. For this purpose, it examines both everyday discourses of Singaporean employers about female migrant domestic workers and the efforts of the Singapore Muslim Converts’ Association to teach such workers to become ‘good Muslims'.     

‘Being while black’: resistance and the management of the self

‘Being while black’ is ultimately an ‘everyday revolution’, Despite the fact that people manage their selves by their own choosing, especially as their desires are being shaped (Foucault, 1977), their selves remains the basic revolutionary unit. Foucault's oeuvre on power and concept of dressage is utilized to explain racial profiling of blacks of what I call ‘racial dressage’, intended primarily to discipline the ‘black body’ (el-Khoury, 2009). In this paper, I argue that despite this false sense of presence of power and internalized social-control, blacks actively construct their day-to-day activities as a discursive object of resistance. Critical awareness to racial oppression is in itself is a form of opposition to it (Collins, 1990). I argue that social control and resistance are coproduced. Using discursive analysis of interviews I identified the following modes of resistance: disposition to steadiness (constituting an ethical self, sustaining an internal dialogue, and emotional management), rejecting criminalizing identities, discursive consciousness, refusing the spatial power, and lastly disbelief in the system. Ultimately, blacks live against ‘themselves’ and this is because the soul that has become the prison of the body, is being dismantled (Luxon, 2008).     

An introduction: the predicament of Brazilian culture

‘Truth’ and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth‐century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific ‘truth’ and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio‐historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.     

U dhashay—Ku dhashay: Genealogical and Territorial Discourse in Somali History

Genealogical reckoning has always been a prominent aspect of Somali social organisation long characterised as a ‘segmentary’ lineage-based political system. Beyond this ethnographic foundation there was also a widely-held view that the Somali nation—despite the inherent ‘republicanism’ of the segmentary system—did at least possess a distinctive and inclusive ‘national’ genealogy. However for a decade now—following the collapse of the unified state of Somalia—authors have been re-examining the basic assumptions of the Somali nation. True to the traditions of the segmentary system they describe, a younger generation of scholars has challenged their elders and these youthful revisionists have uncovered the ethnic and even ‘racial’ complexity of the Somali state and questioned the dominant national genealogical discourses. This article asks that the dominant genealogical framework of Somali studies be taken back to its local contexts, and that descent by lineage (or indeed race) should be seen as only one part of the repertoire of political legitimacy in Somalia.     

Fearing yellow,imagining white: media analysis of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was a watershed event in the context of race, nation, and the law because it denied Chinese immigration into the USA for over 80 years. This paper analyses the media coverage of the Chinese in the San Francisco Chronicle during the year of the Act's passage. The theoretical framework of ‘Purity and Danger’ provides a starting point in analyzing how whiteness and nation are constructed as ‘pure’, while Chinese immigration is constructed as a ‘danger’ within a symbolic, racial and political manner. Discourse analysis was applied to the data for an intersectional investigation of race, class, gender, and nation, to determine how the discourse is organized thematically, as well as uncover ideological meanings in relation to how ‘fearing yellow’ also reflected ‘imaging white’ in media discourse.     

Race and opportunity in a public alternative school

This qualitative case-study explores questions about the stratifying role of public alternative schools created for ‘at-risk’ youth by analyzing the school experience of students who attend a single continuation high school and the process of student enrollment and referral to that school. Drawing on the concept of whiteness as property, this article demonstrates how the continuation high school maintained and protected the property functions of whiteness through acts of symbolic violence and the systematic removal of non-white students from the school district’s mainstream high school. Instead, students were placed in a substandard alternative school lacking in material and intellectual resources. Furthermore, teachers, counselors, and administrative staff at the mainstream and continuation high schools alike drew upon the racial ideology of merit to rationalize the overrepresentation of non-white youths at the study school and to ‘deracialize’ the student referral process.     

Racial contestation and the emergence of populist nationalism in the United States

Much of the discussion surrounding nationalism still revolves around the ethnic versus civic nation divide. For purposes of this paper it is more useful to view the United States from the tri-modal perspective offered by Anderson, in which the United States is a creole (or settler) nation. All of Anderson's types can be seen as variants of ethnic nationalism. Kaufmann argues that the US evolved from ethnic to civic nationalism by the 1960s. This argument overlooks the importance of phenotype-based racism in the evolution of creole, or white settler colonial nationalism. We want to argue that US nationalism evolved from ethnic, to white racial nationalism in the interwar years. Since the 1920s, the political establishment has opted for civic nationalism that is based upon ‘white assimilationism’. This civic nationalism has been challenged by multiculturalism since the 1960s. In the context of a democratic political culture, the content of American nationalism has become ‘populist’ in the sense that it has come under popular contestation from the assimilationist right and the multiculturalist left. This populist nationalism includes aspects of ethnic and civic nationalism. Racial formation theory will be used to show that national identity may remain under ‘relatively permanent political contestation’ with racial cleavage as a major fault line in that contest. The issues of immigration and the treatment of Muslims since 9/11 will be addressed in order to make the case.     

‘A town new and modern in conception’: non-racial dreams and racial realities in the making of Gaborone,Botswana

ABSTRACT

Botswana has long been praised for its financial and political achievements. High economic growth rates and uninterrupted democratic governance since independence in 1966 have led to Botswana's labeling as the ‘African Miracle’. Long before Botswana's emergence as a darling of Western development agencies however, Tswana elites and colonial officials also saw Botswana as exceptional: surrounded by states divided along racial lines, these individuals sought to construct a nation organized around principles of racial and tribal unity. Aspirations of non-racialism were to be exemplified in Botswana's newly constructed capital city, Gaborone. At the same time, underlying the planning vision for Gaborone was a competing set of narratives, practices and aspirations that undercut these lofty ideals and resulted in the creation of a city highly stratified by racial segregation. This essay identifies three complementary urban planning rationales that produced urban exclusion in Gaborone: the desire to build Gaborone as an administrative capital, borrowing from both colonial and indigenous Tswana traditions that privileged spatial divisions related to status and race, and the goal to build a ‘modern’ urban center to lead Botswana into the future. These tensions divided the city in ways both familiar and unexpected and set the parameters determining who counts as a legitimate resident of the city. The paper, therefore, seeks to explore how a city founded on an ideal of racial unity instead became a site of stark division(s).     

Teaching about race and social action by ‘digging up the past’: the Mary Turner project

This paper explores how incorporating localized historical acts of racial injustice into Sociology courses can have a variety of pedagogical and social impacts. The use of one such event, the 1918 lynching of 13 people in South Georgia, led to the formation of the Mary Turner Project (MTP). We document the organization’s work as well as its impact on students and the region, as seen through the lens of public sociology. The MTP installed an official road marker to memorialize the lynching, intervened in a campus controversy involving the Confederate flag, hosted numerous commemoration events, and did classroom-based research and hosted community discussions on lynching and slavery in the local area. Drawing from organizational documents, the paper explores how ‘digging up the past’ and the experience of the MTP may serve as a model for critical sociologists who teach courses on social inequalities and want to make those courses more applicable to people’s every day lived experience.     

Negotiating the limits of upbringing,education, and racial hygiene in Nazi Germany as exemplified in the study and treatment of Sinti and Roma

Abstract

Like other minorities, Sinti and Roma were victims of racial persecution by the Nazis. For this group in particular, the Racial-Hygienic and Heredity Research Centre in the Reich Health Office became a central institution in the Nazi system of extermination. Eva Justin, a reseacher at the Centre, published her doctoral dissertation while working there. The dissertation discusses the possibility of ‘educating’ Sinti and Roma and of making them useful to the German Volksgemeinschaft (‘community of the people’). In this article, I examine Justin’s notions of a subject’s capacity to be brought up and educated and how these notions can be understood in the context of antiziganism, racial hygiene, and National Socialism. In particular, I elucidate her notions of a subject’s capacity to be brought up and educated and the attributes and interpretative framework with which she contrued Sinti and Roma as ‘objects of upbringing and education’.     

Will to love,will to fear: the emotional politics of illegality and citizenship in the campaign against birthright citizenship in the US

Anti-immigration activists argue that the broad inclusivity of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment is a national security concern that enables criminalized migrant mothers to give birth to citizens who can later harm the US through violence and resource consumption. Seeing this argument as representative of the problem of inclusivity inherent to citizenship in a liberal democracy, this essay asks how the children of undocumented and temporary migrants are constructed as what Mae Ngai calls ‘alien citizens.’ Drawing from Sara Ahmed's affective economy of emotion, I find that affect and emotion figure prominently in how citizens are made ‘alien.’ Specifically love and fear function as pivot points in the anti-birthright citizenship argument, wherein the ‘real citizen’ is ‘willed’ to love and be loved by the nation and to fear the nation's Others. Moreover, the emphasis on national feelings does not evacuate white supremacy or heteronormativity from its imagination of citizenship, but instead displaces these loci of power into feeling and affect. Thus, this essay claims that the birthright citizenship argument illustrates how national love and fear work in tandem to uphold, naturalize, and expand the racial and sexual exclusions inherent to citizenship in a nation-state.     

Becoming cosmopolitan: encountering difference in a city of mobile labour

ABSTRACT

Many who move countries today do so for work, and labour mobility – both temporary and permanent – is the mechanism by which countless people (both movers and stayers) come into contact with cultural difference. The domain of mobile labour is thus an important context through which to consider the transformative possibilities of encounters with racial and cultural difference. Situated within debates on everyday multi-culture and vernacular cosmopolitanisms, this essay considers the question of intercultural encounter at work in relation to the layered histories of race and variegated citizenships of mobile labour in Singapore. Exploring the micro-nature of cosmopolitan practices, the paper considers under what labour conditions might an outward-looking cosmopolitan sensibility and a convivial openness to otherness emerge among migrant workers, as against a set of survival-based intercultural capacities. I reflect specifically upon two cases of ‘incongruous encounter’ in workplaces reliant on precariously employed migrant labour: a mainland Chinese man and a Filipina woman who, because of Singapore’s racialised system of work visas, find themselves working in South Asian restaurants in Singapore’s Little India. They both engage ‘cosmopolitan practices’, yet their sensibilities differ sharply. Their stories highlight how, in a place like Singapore, the ‘encounter’ needs to be understood within a regime of mobile labour, situated racial hierarchies, and a highly stratified system of work visas. I further suggest that situational factors such as the nature of work including its spatial and temporal qualities, the mixture of co-workers, and recognition relations with superiors all mattered in framing the affective atmospheres of encounter. In a context of forced encounter, I argue that learnt capacities to function and interact across difference should not necessarily be romanticised as a cosmopolitan sensibility.     

Between Civilizations: One Side of a Dialogue

In the present global context, the ‘problem’ of religion in relation to gender has become predominantly about the situation of Muslim women and what this indicates about the state of our civilization. Thus, in such incidents as the death of Aqsa Parvez (age 16) in late 2007 in Toronto, Canada, Muslim women's bodies, as many scholars have argued, become the battlegrounds which clearly demarcate the line between the civilized secular modern nation and premodern religious fundamentalisms. In this paper, I want to extend this critical work by bringing in an analysis of the second or ‘homegrown’ generation as it is in this context, I will argue that national anxieties about Canada's global status as a tolerant multicultural nation are most pronounced. Drawing on the work of Asad (2003), Mahmood (2006) and Brown (2006), I will outline how conceptions of tolerance and secularism operate through culture to produce a racialized distinction between the civilized, modern citizen and premodern fundamentalist groups in the making of Canada as a white settler multicultural nation. In order to illustrate this concretely, I will carry out a critical content analysis of representations of Aqsa Parvez's death in the media, representations which clearly demonstrate the contemporary operation of secularism and tolerance in relation to multiculturalism and its particular intensity as it pertains to second generation Muslims. In the conclusion, I want to reflect on how we might rethink our understanding of violence against Muslim women in order to destabilize this powerful binaristic framing which continues to secure a white settler hegemony of ‘multiculturalism within a bilingual framework’ even as it obscures the power relations through which it sustains a racial hierarchy.     

‘Mixed’ Japanese-Filipino identities under Japanese multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

The ways in which multiculturalism is debated and practiced forms an important frame for ‘mixed’ ethnic identities to take shape. In this paper, I explore how young migrants of Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ parentage make sense of their ethnic identities in Japan. My key findings are that dominant discourses constructing the Japanese nation as a monoracial, monolingual and monoethnic nation leave no space for diversity within the definition of ‘Japanese’, creating the necessity for alternative labels like haafu or ‘mixed roots’. Japanese multiculturalism does not provide alternative narratives of Japaneseness but preserves the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity by recognizing diversity while maintaining ethnic and racial boundaries. Lastly, these categories have not been actively questioned by my respondents. Rather, they show flexibility in adopting these various labels – haafu, ‘mixed roots’, Filipino, Firipin-jin – in different contexts.     

‘Both an Arab and a woman’: gendered,racialised experiences of female Palestinian citizens of Israel

Following feminist and postcolonial discourses, this paper uses the concept of ‘everyday experience’ as a tool to trace the social world of educated Palestinian women in Israel. The term refers to the complex array of these women's experiences in racialised and gendered social sites, as well as within the class, religious, and ethnic contexts in the subordinated group and its relations with the dominant Jewish group. Based on 108 in‐depth interviews with Palestinian women citizens of Israel, the paper claims that educated Palestinian women are located in a ‘third place’ between cultural, gender, class, national and racial structures that generates a continual ambivalence. Within this marginal, ‘unhomely’ space women negotiate their own identities and challenge dominant social definitions. Women create various modes of interim spaces and multi‐dimensional, shifting identities for themselves. The ambivalent attitudes generated by the women's experiences expose the possibility of shedding categorising markers. The omnipresent existence of the gendered, racialised regime of knowledge makes every place a potential site of subversion and resistance.     

Ultranationalist discourses of exclusion: a comparison between the Hungarian Jobbik and the Greek Golden Dawn

In this paper I present the extensive discourse analysis of texts produced by the electorally exceptionally successful Greek and Hungarian ultranationalist parties. I first demonstrate that although both have adopted the topics, arguments and rhetorical figures of racist discourse, they differ in the relative importance they attach to culture and biology. That is, while GD imposes rigid, impermeable boundaries to a nation bound together by the ties of common ancestry, excluding ‘others’ on grounds of purported racial inferiority, Jobbik focuses more on culture as the dominant marker that separates off ‘us’ from ‘them’. I then try to explain the emergent patterns by relating them to context-specific categorisation strategies as well as the historically constituted conceptions of ‘Greekness’ and ‘Hungarianness’. I show that the construction of ‘otherness’ is markedly different in the two societies in terms of the chosen ‘enemies’, the preferred identity-markers as well as the processes of boundary drawing. The findings demonstrate that we need to think in a more differentiated way about the possible configurations of the culture/biology and difference/superiority nexus as shaped by the historically constituted and deeply rooted perceptions of difference in each context.     

师儒与官绅：传统中国治水社会的士绅研究述评

Already for quite some time, the u-nique power structure of the traditional Chinese so-ciety has been viewed and discussed in the field of humanities and social sciences. Focusing on the status and role of its gentry class, Chinese and Western scholars have deeply researched the gen-eral characteristics of the political structure in the traditional Chinese society. And the analysis of the interaction between different social groups from the perspective of the traditional Chinese ‘hydraulic ’ structure has even gradually deepened and expand-ed this research topic. This paper looks at relevant research conducted by former scholars like e. g. Weber, Wittfogel, and Fei Xiaotong while attemp-ting to come to a more historic understanding of the relationship between the imperial power and the gentry class within the power structure of tradition-al Chinese society: this essay indeed focuses on the political status and social function of the gentry class in the traditional Chinese hydraulic society. Based on the research findings of scholars like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Heinrich Marx, Weber pointed out that in Eastern societies there was a certain relationship between the autoc-racy and the local irrigation-based agriculture. And Weber believed that the relationship between the autocratic imperial power and the more local Con-fucian gentry was the key to understanding the po-litical structure of the Chinese society. At that time and place, the local water management-projects, other entrenched bureaucracies, the respected Confucian gentry, as well as the central imperial power were all intertwined together; this shaped a unique form of political power in traditional China. By borrowing Marx’ s concept of ‘the Asiatic mode of production’ , Wittfogel discussed the rela-tionship between ( i ) the political autocracy and ( ii) indigenous irrigation projects in Eastern socie-ties, seen from the perspective of political econom-ics. He proposed that the political autocracy was a result of the social functioning of hydraulic pro-jects, and briefly described the Eastern society as an ‘Oriental-authoritarian ’ society under the rule of an ‘absolute monarchy’ . In the eyes of Wittfo-gel, the traditional Chinese gentry was just a bu-reaucratic group attached to the totalitarian rule:their power did not draw from their own knowledge monopoly of value ethics and ritual standards, but solely from their power-relationship with the des-potic ruler. According to Wittfogel, the‘hydraulic society’ , totalitarian rule, bureaucratic groupings, and imperial power were all intertwined and togeth-er made up the government form of the traditional Chinese society. While Weber described the gentry as reputa-ble Confucian intellectuals, Wittfogel regarded them as mere bureaucrats firmly attached to the to-talitarian rule. In contrast with the Western schol-ars’ too simple view of the ‘gentry group’, Chi-nese scholars have emphasized that this ‘gentry group’ was an organism made up of bureaucrats and literati:they not only participated in local gov-ernance and cultural activities, but they also lived and passed on the inheritance of Confucian ortho-dox ideology. Fei Xiaotong stressed constantly that the tradi-tional Chinese political system wasn ’ t completely arbitrary;instead it was closely related to the so-cial class of the scholar-officials ( a combination of the bureaucrats and gentry within Chinese socie-ty) . Fei stated that the traditional Chinese society had a‘bottom-up’ or‘secondary/parallel’ track:this ‘informal track’ made it possible for the ordi-nary people to pass on their opinions to top level people. Guided by tao-t’ung ( Confucian orthodox-y) , the scholar-intellectuals were able to influence political power by expressing their opinions and by putting forward a set of ethical principles. Al-though they had no part in real political power, they still maintained a social prestige. As a buffer between imperial power and the common people, the scholar-officials could not only extend the pow-er of the monarch to the far corners of society, but they also could properly protect the interests of farmers through some informal channels outside of the system. In the view of Yu Yingshi, the scholar-offi-cials not only were royal officers but also teachers of the emperor: that is why they could exert con-straint to autocratic imperial power. Nevertheless, autocratic imperial power also constrained them. Even so, the bureaucrats and gentry kept alive the tao-t’ung in traditional Chinese political life, which safeguarded basic social values. However, the strength of tao-t’ung was always weaker than that of the royal power, therefore, Chinese society did have a tendency of ‘oriental despotism’ described by Wittfogel. In the study of Zhang Yahui, the scholar-offi-cial group was positioned right in middle of the so-ciety: this allowed them to work upwardly and downwardly. They thus could ( i) cooperate with the public to fight against the rulers ’ invasion of local life, and they ( ii) could compromise and a-gree with the rulers as to construct a new harmoni-ous coexistence model. His study reemphasized the historical role of the scholar-official group in keep-ing social harmony. In this study, the scholar-offi-cial group on one hand counterbalanced the central power’ s interference with local affairs, and on the other hand shaped more reasonable identities of the central power, acceptable for local communities. Zhang Yahui’ s study reminds us that-in the tradi-tional Chinese society-authoritarian rulers, the scholar-official group, and the public interlaced with, constrained, and supported each other, and thus constituted the overall picture of the traditional China. The scholar-official group thus was a major force in maintaining the social cohesion of the tra-ditional Chinese society. When indeed we consider both the ‘master-scholars’ and ‘bureaucrats’-the two special components of Chinese scholar-official class-we can better understand the characteristics of the vivid and interactive relationships between the rulers, the scholar-officials, and the local com-mon people. In other words, only when we recog-nize these two aspects of the gentry class, can we see the ‘unifying mechanism ’ of the traditional Chinese society;this allows us to develop a clearer social and historical picture of the traditional Chi-nese interaction between imperial power, scholarly power, and civil rights. To get to this new under-standing of the power structure of the traditional Chinese hydraulic society, we need to critically re-view all sorts of other simplified understandings of the period gentry group.     

Negotiating postcolonial Eurasian identities and national belonging in global-city Singapore

ABSTRACT

A racial classification regime, partly derived from colonial race categories that solidified during the British Empire, remains a key governance strategy in postcolonial Singapore, sorting citizens into the categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (CMIO). This racial grid continues to be a simplification of the actual complexity of lived identities and experiences, particularly for people of mixed descent. In this context, we explore the contemporary meanings and resonances of racial identity and national belonging as negotiated among members of a historic mixed-descent community – the Eurasians – in the context of a nation-state built on an institutionally fixed racial template. As a community, Eurasians are commonly attributed to the presence and mixing of especially Dutch, Portuguese and British – but also other Europeans – with an equally variegated palette of Asian cultures, since the 16th century. Based on 30 biographical interviews with self- identified Eurasians of two generations, this paper examines how individual and collective narratives of ‘old’ hybrid identities are changing in relation to the emergence of potentially new hierarchies of racial belonging with the arrival of new migration and the rise of international marriage in globalizing times. Given the lived reality of an expanding range of ‘race’ identities of different permutations and combinations, the politics of choice is played out between countervailing forces which draw racialized boundaries around the community more tightly on the one hand, and liberalize claims to racial and national belonging on the basis of self-identification on the other.