3 - The Place of Migrant Workers in Singapore: Between State Multiracialism and Everyday (Un)Cosmopolitanisms

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Increasing flows of transnational migration have fuelled a new spatial order of interconnectivities among nations and cities, leading to a host of both anticipated and unanticipated human encounters between locals and migrants. These encounters and the subsequent possibilities for creative synergies, destructive tensions and missed opportunities have had a significant impact on the sociocultural texture of cities. In particular, this has resulted in “populations and social structures which have previously been rather more separate now increasingly imping[ing] physically and materially on one another's living conditions” (Hannerz 1996, p. 56). In this light, cosmopolitanism as a unifying vision for urban democracy and governance, signifying a culture of openness and acceptance and underpinned by the values of inclusion and tolerance of difference, is back in currency. Some scholars have even proclaimed the cosmopolitan city as “the hallmark of truly global cities” (Short 2006, p. 223) and a necessary response to the empirical reality of multicultural cities of today (Binnie et al. 2006). However, this idealized treatment of cosmopolitanism as a solution to the multifarious sociocultural and sociopolitical landscapes of contemporary cities needs further probing, especially in the manner in which it has neglected the importance of “diverse local agents, social forces and institutions” in actively participating and shaping the processes of global city formation (Brenner and Keil 2005, p. 12).

Singapore provides a useful example of an emergent global city where a state-engineered “cosmopolitanization” has been central to aspirations of top-tier global city status. It is also, however, a city where the experience and application of cosmopolitanism has been neither universal nor unproblematic (see Yeoh 2004). In this vein, this chapter attempts to unpack cosmopolitanism in Singapore by uncovering two possible arenas of tension and slippage — in the discursive field and in the realm of everyday practices — in response to the state's “cosmopolizing” efforts. It begins with a brief review of academic discussions of cosmopolitanism and how the notion has been appropriated by the Singapore state, before launching into an investigation of how such state-mandated cosmopolitanism complements/ contradicts Singapore's founding ideology of multiracialism as well as sentiments towards male foreign workers in public spaces.