The Study of
Curatorial Culture
Curatorial Culture
ISSUE 9 Curating Against Forgetting
Icon and Network: Solidarity’s Mediums and a Materialist Internationalism
In May 2020, as Singapore, like many countries, was hit by the COVID-19 outbreak, and went into national lockdown, scenes of large-scale protests against the police killing of Black American George Floyd were taking place across the world, rattling residents of the city-state where such public gatherings of a political nature are unheard of. For all the sympathies that many would have felt for the protesters’ grievances, strict laws governing public assembly have not only severely curtailed the scope of any kind of protest in the country, but have also produced over time a public pathologically averse to confrontational forms of civil resistance.1 But to a younger generation becoming increasingly passionate about issues of racial justice—a result not only of exposure to social movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM), but also of public incidents in recent years that have brought to light the persistent discrimination faced by racial minorities in Singapore—such constraints experienced amidst the lockdown produced a sense of immobilization that could only find relief on social media.2 As protests intensified in much of the Western hemisphere, expressions of solidarity circulated online accompanied by comparisons to similar conditions of systemic injustice in the country. For one, if Black lives matter to Singaporeans, surely what must also matter are the lives of the over one million low-wage migrant workers living in their midst, whose lives are rendered precarious by abusive employers and deficient labor laws. That these same workers had been affected by the outbreak in overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers, owing to their overcrowded and often unsanitary dormitory conditions, only underlined the urgency for collective action. Memes calling for migrant lives to matter quickly went viral.
Unsurprisingly, such attempts at drawing analogies between Black lives in the U.S. and those of marginalized communities in Singapore brought out the standing brigade of detractors peddling the tired argument of Singaporean exceptionalism, albeit retooled for the new digital-nativist campaign against “wokeness.”3 As the argument goes, the material circumstances of Singapore and the U.S. are so different that any suggestion of comparability between the two can only be a projection of the foreign (read: Western) ideology upon the local conditions that denies the specificity of their regional history and demography. These commentators would further substantiate their claims by dredging up “facts” that presumably delegitimize the movement in the U.S., for example by pointing to a handshake between the movement’s founders with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro as evidence of their links to “radical leftist” ideology, or by framing affluent supporters of the movement as “champagne socialists” calling to “defund the police” while nestled within their gated communities.4 Against the perceived naiveté of international supporters of the movement drawing analogies based on shallow resemblances facilitated by the speed of circulation on social media were thus held up the “real” networks of influence and capital enabling this economy of appearances.
What are we to make of this holding up of the real against expressions of transnational solidarity often accused of having lost touch with reality by virtue of their technomediation? Might this “return” of the real speak less to the validity of the arguments against wokeness than to an entrenched vulnerability within the social justice meme as a means of making progressive ideas “go viral”? Is it not remarkable that, for all the analysis that was borne out of the semantic slippage between the “virality” of racial justice and the “virus” itself, this critical appropriation of the contagion would be tested by an oppositional account of transmission that apparently cut closer to the real of the (viral) network?
To begin, for all the conflation of the virus and the Internet meme, the transmission of the latter, unlike the virus, occurs, as do all memes, mimetically. Its transmission depends upon iconic reproduction, that is, the imitation of an object’s likeness. In contrast, the mode of transmission that is understood to constitute the “real” network behind this mimetic economy is truly contagious in the sense that it happens through contact relations. Just as the COVID-19 virus is transmitted through a handshake or an exchange of breaths, the networks of influence and capital often brought up to cast social movements like BLM as duplicitous are established through material flows that often belie the lack of overt resemblances between the parties implicated. Such transmissions leave in their wake not so much an image with iconic value as a trace leading us backwards in time along the chain of material transfers that gave rise to the indexical sign—not unlike how asymptomatic carriers of the COVID-19 virus were tracked down through contact tracing at the height of the pandemic. This leaves us in rather peculiar discursive territory: somehow it is on the side of those in denial over the grievances expressed by BLM where we find ourselves anywhere close to a materialist critique.
While it is true that broad-based movements like BLM encompass positions substantive enough to call the bluff on the “materialist” attack against them, their technomediation through the social justice meme in the past few years has inevitably lent credence to the perception of these movements being founded on a fundamentally hollow iconology. The backlash expressed online against the “woke” brand of liberal identity politics has sometimes even spilled offline to produce seismic political shifts. In the U.S., for example, the rise of a “materialist left” calling for a genuinely redistributive left politics, as championed most prominently by supporters of Bernie Sanders, has proven to be no match for the “materialist” right and its barrage of conspiracy theories on the nefarious networks of “special interests” backing the “liberal left.”5 Here, the turn to conspiracy is motivated, above all, by an iconoclasm that seeks to peel away at the liberal facade of propriety and expose the entanglements of elite interests beneath. However, conspiracy claims inevitably culminate in their own iconicity, as best seen in Donald Trump’s compelling metaphor of “draining the swamp” in reference to his mission of ridding Washington of said special interests, that left unexamined his own contamination by these same interests.
For all its contradictions, such a mode of critique acquires significant rhetorical force when harnessed against expressions of transnational solidarity that sometimes struggle to articulate the material stakes that would allow these expressions to go beyond virtual signaling. In fact, even when the conditions of global capitalism are broached, it is often not on the basis of the actual circulation of goods, labor and capital that solidarity is articulated, but an analogous connection made between how “they” are being exploited by capitalism “over there” just like how “we” are being exploited by capitalism “over here.” This “because capitalism” argument, to put it bluntly, falls short of accounting for the global chains of value whereby the interests of large portions of the middle class in a city-state as financialized as Singapore are so intimately bound up with those of the global billionaire class that the turn to analogy serves less to imagine a basis for solidarity with the global underclass than to obfuscate the material circulations between “here” and “there” that are determinative of one’s proximity to capital. That these circulations remain so critically unexamined has little to do with our inability to represent them. Rather, it results from the thrall of iconicity that reduces representation to its analogical function and displaces the patient but necessary labor of explicating the relations of power that make representation actually matter. As we shall see later in this essay, such concerns were already raised over forty years ago by a Third World internationalism that ended up being consumed by its own iconology. After all, what are icons but images that efface more than they make visible?
“Crazy Rich” Materialism
1 The free speech zone known as Speakers’ Corner located in a public park in downtown Singapore is the only space in the city-state where protests can be lawfully held without a permit.
2 In July 2019, an advertisement featuring a Chinese actor putting on “brownface” to play Malay and Indian characters was heavily criticized for its racial insensitivity. Subsequently, a rap video produced by YouTube comedian Preeti Nair and rapper Subhas Nair lampooning the advertisement attracted even more controversy when it was investigated by the police for incendiary rhetoric. For a concise account and analysis of the events, see Ruby Thiagarajan, “Brownface and Racism in Singapore,” New Narratif, August 1, 2019, https://newnaratif.com/journalism/brownface-and-racism-in-singapore.
3 While the term “woke” originated in African American slang as a variation of “awake,” it is used today more generally to refer to a condition of being conscious of social justice issues, especially where it relates to race, gender and sexuality. As a term which gained currency through its circulation on social media, its changing connotations have been shaped by its weaponization in the online “culture wars” of recent years. See Aja Romano, “A history of ‘wokeness’,” Vox, October 9, 2020, https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy.
4 In Singapore, the use of “champagne socialist” as a derogatory term for persons of middle to upper class upbringing who espouse socially progressive causes was popularized by Calvin Cheng, a prominent online commentator and supporter of the ruling government. Apart from Cheng, Critical Spectator, a Facebook page ran by a Polish expatriate in Singapore, was especially vociferous in its critique of the BLM movement and its influence on the younger generation in Singapore.
5 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (London: Zero Books, 2017), 68.
Two years before the protests against the killing of George Floyd inspired a reflection on racial justice in Singapore, another cultural moment in the U.S. sparked off a debate on race, wealth and privilege in the Southeast Asian city-state, except that this time the connection between the two countries required no recourse to analogy. The occasion was the release of the film Crazy Rich Asians, the first major Hollywood production with a majority Asian cast in over twenty years that is set almost entirely in Singapore. Based on the best-selling novel of the same title by the Singaporean-American author Kevin Kwan, the film follows a Chinese-American professor on her first trip to Singapore where she meets the family of her boyfriend only to realize how unimaginably wealthy they are. In the U.S., the film was lauded within the mainstream media as a milestone for Asian American representation. This reception stood in contrast to the horror expressed by some within the community, as well as the larger Asian diaspora in the West, in seeing themselves represented by a film that at best expressed an amused indulgence with an untamed capitalist class.6
Meanwhile, the critical opinion in Singapore largely questioned the representational premise upon which much of the celebration of the film was based by focusing on its marginalizing of the city-state’s ethnic minorities, who mostly appear as service staff attending to the wealthy Young family, whose members are all part of the Chinese majority.7 The film’s conservative gender dynamics also invited scrutiny.8 However, when it came to the prickly issue of wealth, it was curiously not the family’s immense fortune that was problematized, but the absence of Singapore’s largely middle class society from the film. Whereas the critique of the film’s depiction of the super-rich coming from left-leaning media outside of Singapore condemned its sanitization of the global wealth gap, the domestic reception largely took issue with the portrayal on the basis not of the distributional crisis it effaces, but of a failure of representation (not unlike the reasoning that underwrites the critique on race and gender).9 The problem, as expressed by a common refrain, was that 99% of the people in the country, unlike the characters in the film, do not have the privilege of inherited wealth, and are, more likely than not, living in one of the country’s successful public housing projects—a quasi-socialist exception within the hypercapitalist tax haven—which do not appear at all in the film. In other words, the problem was not wealth inequality per se, but the grossly disproportionate representation within the film of the lived experiences of the country’s most wealthy 1% at the expense of the 99%.
This pitting of the top 1% against the 99% standing for “the people” is, of course, not an original figuration, but one that can be traced to the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, during which the slogan, “We are the 99%,” went viral and came to influence other social movements across the world. Happening in the wake of the economic devastation wrought by the 2008 global financial crisis, the slogan, at least in its original appearance in the U.S., spoke to the enormous wealth gap between the top 1% and the rest of the population that had widened since the crisis. Much of the anger centered on how workers in non-financial sectors had been made to bear much of the fallout, despite their holding little responsibility for the crisis. Yet, for all its expressed intent of foregrounding inequality under capitalism, this critique on wealth does not, in the final analysis, constitute a class discourse. As Rosalind C. Morris observes, the delineation between the 1% and the 99% glosses over the vast socioeconomic disparities within the 99%, which includes everyone from the most destitute to the well-heeled managerial class. In fact, in stretching the idiom of majoritarianism toward its limit in the expression of “near totality” that is the 99%, what is ultimately espoused by the discourse is not even an ethnopolitical project but a “moral iconology” wherein justice is served on the basis of calculative reason.10
This depoliticization by numerical count becomes especially pronounced in its co-opting by the critique of Crazy Rich Asians in Singapore, wherein the demand for an isomorphism between what is perceived as the material conditions of the 99% of the country and their representation on screen can only suggest an uncritical acceptance of already existent class relations interior to the category of the 99%. How else can we understand the framing of the problem of the super-rich as a problem of elitism, of the lives of the 1% being divorced from those of the 99%, when it is how capital circulates (or does not circulate) between the different socioeconomic classes that is determinative of class relations and the resultant wealth gap? How can one even translate the statistical abstraction upon which the defining iconology of Occupy Wall Street is based onto a city-state with an economy so financialized that it practically stands for the Wall Street of the region, and where significant segments of the middle class depend upon this financialization to sustain their modestly affluent lifestyles? Has the question of class been so utterly foreclosed by liberal identity politics that even in the face of the distributional crisis of late capitalism the only means of addressing the staggering inequality is a set of icons expressive of a self-present “we” stripped of any class positionality?
Perhaps this is too much to ask of a society that had since the late eighties imbibed the narrative promulgated by the long-ruling party that it had successfully transformed itself into a largely middle class, home-owning society.11 Reinforcing this disavowal of class politics is the relative opacity of the forms of capital accumulation that contribute to the extreme wealth of the city-state, as reflected in the film by the young scion’s reticent reply when his girlfriend probed him on the source of his family’s wealth: “real estate, investment, other things, nothing interesting.” And indeed, judging by the public sentiment, there is nothing interesting about the lack of capital gains or inheritance taxes in Singapore that would have allowed the Youngs to grow their fortune over generations, or about its entire financial services industry that can be considered to have truly underwritten the film. Such is the profane reality of the global financial centre that has, ever since it established the Asian Dollar Market in 1968, seen the financial industry less as a source of capital to grow local industries than a site of capital accumulation in itself and for itself, effectively decoupling it from the domestic real economy and its circulation of goods and services in the public sphere where capital accumulation is most observable.12
With the liberalization of its banking and capital markets after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the city-state has further seen the rapid expansion of its bond and equity markets and its rise as the region’s leading asset management centre. Despite the characterization of the Youngs as “old money rich,” it is really “new money” from Asia that has driven the sector’s growth, with many among the growing number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals in Asia relocating their assets to Singapore in order to benefit from its low taxes, strict bank secrecy laws and vast pools of financial and legal talent. This offshoring of the private assets of the super-rich has proceeded alongside the securitization of the larger global economy through innovative arrangements that “liberate” debt instruments from the actual value of the assets backing them, thus prioritizing their availability for speculation over the heightened risks borne by the owners of these relatively modest assets.13 As Saskia Sassen notes, this development marks a turn towards more directly extractive, or in other words, “primitive” modes of accumulation that require ever-more complex financial and legal infrastructures to achieve what amounts to a direct pillaging of the working class, therefore embedding the sizeable managerial class in a financial centre like Singapore even more deeply within a system responsible for exacerbating the global wealth gap.14 Unsurprisingly, no one in the city-state is making the argument that has been taken up by left-wing movements internationally that “billionaires should not exist.”
Given this, my contention is that the collective disidentification that some in Singapore have expressed towards Crazy Rich Asians on representational grounds can only be sustained through a disavowal of the material circulations that render the city-state an essential conduit for diverting the social surplus away from the global underclass, including the precarious Black lives that would gain much attention two years later. It follows that when the turn to an analogous Blackness—by way of projecting Blackness onto the country’s own racialized and marginalized communities—was made, this time in identification with an American cultural moment, what was likewise obscured were the actual, material flows that draft the city-state as a direct participant in the lived experiences of Black America.
Between Here and There
6 See, for example, Fatima Bhutto, “Crazy Rich Asians is no racial triumph. It’s a soulless salute to the 1%,” The Guardian, September 12, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/12/crazy-rich-asians-racial-triumph, and Mark Tseng-Putterman, “One Way That Crazy Rich Asians Is a Step Backward,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/asian-americas-great-gatsby-moment/568213/.
7 See, for example, Kirsten Han, “Crazy Rich Asians is a win for Asian Americans. But it gets Singapore wrong,” Vox, August 17, 2018, https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/17/17715124/crazy-rich-asians-movie-singapore, and Pooja Nansi, “Crazy Rich Asians is one of our saddest moments,” Inkstone, August 22, 2018, https://www.inkstonenews.com/opinion/pooja-nansi-crazy-rich-asians-hailed-representative-it-ignores-people-singapore/article/2160802.
8 Jerrine Tan, “Asian Male Sexuality, the Money-Phallus, and Why Asian Americans Need to Stop Calling Crazy Rich Asians the Asian Black Panther,” Medium, September 1, 2018, https://medium.com/@jerrinetan/asian-male-sexuality-the-money-phallus-and-why-asian-americans-need-to-stop-calling-crazy-rich-e296abb77231.
9 Kirsten Han, “Hollywood Has No Time for Crazy Poor Asians,” Foreign Policy, August 17, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/17/hollywood-has-no-time-for-crazy-poor-asians/.
10 Rosalind C. Morris, “Theses on the New Öffentlichkeit,” Grey Room 51 (Spring 2018): 96.
11 The ruling People’s Action Party has governed the country continuously since it achieved self-governance in 1959.
12 The Asian Dollar Market is a regional market for deposits denominated in US dollars. It was established to leverage Singapore’s favorable time zone that allowed transactions to take place between the closing of American markets and the opening of markets in Europe on the next day. See J.J. Woo, Singapore as an International Finance Centre: History, Policy and Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 45.
13 While risks are certainly borne by those who speculate on these assets, there is a significant asymmetry in terms of who bears the fallout in the event of a default. The stakes are especially high in the financialization of the housing market. While among speculators there will always be winners and losers depending on the “bet” placed on the home, homeowners face certain eviction when they cannot meet their mortgage obligations. See Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 125.
14 Sassen, 128.
One moment worth recalling is the 2008 financial crisis that saw Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF), including those from Singapore, enter the U.S. market to “rescue” insolvent banks which were failing as a result of untenable levels of defaults in the so-called subprime mortgage housing market. Previously scorned by many Western governments owing to their lack of transparency and high level of government involvement in investment decisions, SWFs from Asia and the Middle East were quickly rehabilitated as “white knights” when they bought over sizeable stakes in major U.S. financial institutions, sometimes incurring heavy short-term losses as a result.15 However, in the discourse that followed, which contrasted the long positions taken by SWFs against the speculative frenzies that drove the U.S. economy to the ground, what was excluded from the recuperative process were the subprime borrowers whose homes were foreclosed due to predatory lending practices and regulatory lapses. As studies show, such practices were racially targeted and resulted in the borrowers being disproportionately Black.16 Despite this, the narratives in the U.S. at the time tended to ascribe the quality of “subprime” not to the lender but the borrower, thus marking the latter as an “undeserving and undisciplined” capitalist subject.17
The competing narrative from Asian financial institutions seeking to validate their own policy decisions would later turn the “subprime” signifier on U.S. regulation, but in this refiguration what was achieved was not any dismantling of the racial schema but a strengthening of the positions of these institutions within the global capitalist system that continues to profit off the dispossession of racialized bodies.18 It is notable that following a massive taxpayer bailout of Citigroup in 2008, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, an SWF owned by the Singapore government, turned what was initially a major loss into a US$1.6 billion profit.19
The trouble today is that it’s easier to imagine that everything is connected than to figure out how exactly two things are connected. While the historical reasons for the decline of a materialist critique adequate to this task are too manifold and complex to discuss here, it appears that what has become newly at play in the last decade or so are the forms of technomediation, through which today’s transnational imaginaries are channeled, that harness the affective, associative affordances of global networks while occulting the power relations that constitute and are constituted by them. The desire to access media immediately and for media to mediate immediately first seen with the 24-hour news cycle has been extended through social media in the desire for the audience-turned-user to respond immediately to these immediations. The Internet meme meets this desire through its instant relatability and shareability, virtually collapsing the two processes into each other in a short-circuiting of communication that nullifies the distinction between sender and receiver. Having given up on the prospect of a dialectical encounter with the other, the meme addresses itself directly to the anonymous masses gathered by social media whose projected enormity would alone permit the association of literally any two discrete phenomenon in the world with each other.20 Regardless of whether a protest movement is happening in the U.S., Hong Kong, Thailand, Iran, Lebanon or Chile, all it takes to overcome the distance between “here” and an ostensibly remote “there” is the technomassifying, analogy-drawing power of the social justice meme. This politicized mimetic hyperreality has indeed become more real than any social reality or lived conditions to which it may ostensibly refer.
However, for all its efficacy, what is eclipsed by this all-connecting, ready-to-share model of transnational solidarity is the prospect that what is “there” might already be “here,” and not by virtue of a network of traveling comrades. That is, what if it is in Singapore that Black lives must matter? It is perhaps ironic that an articulation of this spatial convergence that cannot be more explicit comes in the crowning image of Crazy Rich Asians: its parting shot, as captured by a drone, of the protagonist’s engagement party on the roof of Marina Bay Sands (MBS), with the camera gradually pulling away to reveal the full extravagance of the luxury resort’s iconic curved towers surrounded by fireworks. Should one cringe or chuckle at how a film that spends most of its time playing up the differences between America and Asia and looking past their shared networks would, in the moment of cross-cultural romantic consummation, give us an image of America in Singapore? Or more specifically, Las Vegas in Singapore?
As it is well known, MBS is owned by Las Vegas Sands, the American casino and resort developer founded by the late Sheldon Adelson. Outside of his business and investment activities, the multibillionaire was a major Republican Party donor who made the single largest contribution to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. However, in taking in that splendid view of MBS, even the most ardent critic would miss this connection, given that the very architecture of the building was specifically conceived to ensure this. Not only does MBS look nothing like any of the other properties developed by Las Vegas Sands, it was intended that its function as a casino property be architecturally concealed—a move undertaken to reconcile long-standing official disapproval of gambling with the economic benefits of casino legalization.21 As Lee Kah-Wee has documented, this “aesthetic of effacement” was achieved through a vision of “ultra-pastoral modernity” created by the Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie that fully assimilated the resort within the downtown waterfront area that is the city’s financial and civic centre.22 With its breath-taking cantilevered SkyPark, water pavilions and a lotus-inspired structure hosting a museum—extraneous features that were reportedly unappreciated by Adelson—the design of the complex refutes the gaudy kitsch that has typified the casino resort aesthetic while disappearing the casino itself—and its connection to Adelson, Trump, his abhorrent politics, his anti-Blackness—within its mirrored façade, therefore allowing the city-state to continue revelling in its own sparkling clean image.23
However, in this very reflection there is another more consequential narrative of effacement. History tells us that the entire bay area that has become the most recognizable symbol of Singapore’s economic prowess is only what it is today through a state-led revitalization in the late seventies to clear out the slums that were turning the area into what the authorities called a “low-income ghetto” in reference to inner-city neighborhoods in the U.S. heavily populated by Black Americans.24 At the time, urban planners in Singapore had already been studying the social unrest and urban decay often found in these neighborhoods for over a decade and eventually used the experience to shape their policy of mixing housing for different income groups within the same neighborhood.25 This would be followed in the eighties by the Ethnic Integration Policy that established ethnic quotas for public housing. With confidence growing in the continued success of its public housing scheme, the city-state which had in 1967 hosted the Second Afro-Asian Housing Congress no longer saw the ghetto as a site for the collective struggle of those bearing the brunt of development’s costs; instead, the ghetto was now its spectral other.26
But the seventies were a funny decade. While by the end of it, Singapore was positioning itself as a key player within an ascendant East Asian capitalist modernity, the decade had in fact begun with the fledgling nation-state seeking to claim its place within the socialist-leaning internationalist imaginaries that animated what was known as the Third World. It is to these imaginaries that we will now turn.
15 Jerome Couturier, Davide Sola and Paul Stonham, “Are sovereign funds ‘white knights’?” Qualitative Research in Financial Markets 1, no. 3 (2009): 142–51.
16 See, for example, Elvin K. Wyly, Mona Atia, Elizabeth Lee and Pablo Mendez, “Race, gender, and statistical representation: predatory mortgage lending and the US community reinvestment movement,” Environment and Planning A 39 (2007): 2139-2166.
17 Laura Hyun Yi Kang, “The Uses of Asianization: Figuring Crises, 1997-98 and 2007-?,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 2012): 411.
18 Ibid, 428-9.
19 Rick Carew, P.R. Venkat and Costas Paris, “Citi Bailout Also Bails Out Singapore Fund,” The Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2009.
20 Morris, 106.
21 It bears mention that MBS is never officially referred to as a casino resort, with “integrated resort” being the devised alternative.
22 Lee Kah-Wee, Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019), 234-6.
23 As Lee observes, what’s further established by this vision is the establishment of a synecdoche whereby “the Integrated Resort stands for Marina Bay in the same way that Marina Bay stands for Singapore as a whole.” See Lee, 222.
24 “Ministry aims for a city revival,” Business Times, January 5, 1979.
25 William S.W. Lim, “The Quality of Urban Life: With Special Reference To Developing Countries,” Asian Journal of Social Science 1, no. 1 (1973): 81-96.
26 Given their focus on the unequal distribution of wealth, there is little to suggest the racialization of the ghetto by urban planners in Singapore. Nonetheless, the discursive turn in the seventies towards a comparative methodology would see the ghetto consistently described as a site of local policy failure so as to bring out the successes of the Singapore model. This was a marked divergence from the discourse during the 1967 Afro-Asian Housing Congress that tended to attribute the housing crisis in the region not to problematic local governance but to the rapid urbanization that was understood as a universal condition of modernity. See Chia Poteik, “Afro-Asian Builder’s Manual,” The Straits Times, October 15, 1967.
27 The trajectory is based on Vijay Prashad’s history of Third World internationalism. See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007).
Technical Breakdown
Before “going viral” became a force for transnational mobilization, there was already a history of social justice as a contagion spreading the world over. Encompassing the numerous anti-colonial and liberation movements of the twentieth century, this history is marked by key moments of dissemination that include the 1927 League against Imperialism conference in Brussels, the 1947 Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung and the 1961 founding summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade along with its subsequent iterations.27 If the technomediation of today’s transnational solidarities has enabled its iconic reproduction to acquire an immediacy at the expense of the increasing remoteness of the material networks determinative of the limits of such solidarities, might re-examining this history turn up discourses of solidarity capable of withstanding the materialist test, notwithstanding their premature foreclosure by an iconology all too monumental to resist?
At the Fourth Non-Aligned Movement Summit held in Algiers in 1973, it was a speech by the foreign minister of Singapore, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, that foreshadowed the imminent passing of the Movement into irrelevance. In a deviation from his prepared remarks, he opened his speech by addressing a technical breakdown that had taken place the day before:
Yesterday, Mr. Chairman, for some reason, we had a technical breakdown. All the equipment that we are using to threaten the big powers is provided by them. It broke down and we could not communicate. We are all sitting here in planes made and built by the great powers. Without that we cannot hold this conference. We sent telegrams to our home countries. We had to send one to Singapore. It had to go to Paris, London, Singapore. They turn it off; we are lost.28
Coming on the fifth day of a high-stakes conference where such issues as independence for colonies in Portuguese Africa, Palestinian liberation and OPEC were being debated, this reflection on logistical and communication networks by the representative of a politically stable, newly industrializing city-state must have felt almost trivial. However, when seen against the significant geopolitical shifts that have occurred in the lead-up to the summit, Rajaratnam’s concerns were far from misplaced. This was a time of mutual accommodation: the ink was still wet on the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Nixon had visited China and the Vietnam War was coming to an end.29 Rajaratnam signaled these “change of winds” later in this speech when he called for non-aligned countries to disentangle themselves from political battles of the major power blocs and focus instead on technological autonomy and economic cooperation.30 He argued that their failure to do so would strip the movement of its purpose when the present geopolitical alignments inevitably come to an end.
This existential reckoning was overdue for the Movement that had built its identity on being united in its oppositions against colonialism and imperialism, against racism, and, as declared by its name, against alignment with the major power blocs led by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. First conceived at the 1955 Bandung conference, these founding principles reflected the internationalist ethos that framed the struggles for self-determination in parts of the world unshackling themselves from the yoke of colonialism. The 1961 Belgrade summit saw the movement’s geography expand into Eastern Europe and Latin America, increasing its political clout while further complicating efforts at building a consensus around the ways to deliver material change to the people represented at each summit. The array of socioeconomic doctrines subscribed to by the leaders who literally wore their ideologies on their sleeves was on full display at each meeting: military dictators decked in full regalia, Arab leaders espousing a petro-fuelled concoction of Islamism and socialism, card-carrying Marxist-Leninists and self-styled pro-trade pragmatists like Rajaratnam, eloquently rebuking dependency theory in a Western suit.
That the Movement was able to accommodate such divergences was partly due to its uniquely non-hierarchical, rotational and inclusive organizational structure that was adopted from the outset to prevent it from becoming another power bloc.31 Drawing on the “Bandung spirit” of consultation and consensus, the movement succeeded in normalizing a new model for multilateralism but remained frustrated in its articulation of an identity independent from its declared oppositionalities.32 It is against such conditions that the 1973 Algiers summit has been rightly recognized as a watershed, for it was there that calls were made for a new international socioeconomic compact. Rajaratnam was thus no maverick in this respect. In fact, the most prominent plea came from the host of the summit, Algerian president Houari Boumédiene, who began sowing the seeds for what would become the New International Economic Order (NIEO) that sought to redress the systemic inequalities in the global capitalist system. From preferential trade policies to stricter regulation of multinationals to technology and resource transfers, these conditions that were formalized as the NIEO a year later at the United Nations General Assembly managed to translate a broad range of oppositions to the global capitalist system expressed by individual member states into a set of positive demands that most within the Movement, despite their ideological divergences, were able to get behind.33
While Rajaratnam’s staunch anti-protectionism and conciliatory attitude towards multinationals made for an awkward fit within the socialist-leaning formulation of the NIEO, his speech trod on the same materialist ground, indeed extending the critique by turning it upon itself, that is, upon the very technical infrastructure that had allowed the speakers to gather and make their demands in the first place. Furthermore, by foregrounding how his demand for smaller nations to have greater ownership over global logistical and communication networks could only be delivered through these same networks, the charismatic statesman thematized the limit of Third World solidarity movements as a failure of the representational power of speech-making in transforming its material base, thus relegating the leaders speaking on behalf of the vast majority of the world to the role of representation by mere invocation. He would reiterate this position years later at the General Assembly in 1979: “I do not think we are going to get any free ride however much we shout.”34
The Lure of the Indexical
27 The trajectory is based on Vijay Prashad’s history of Third World internationalism. See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007).
28 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, “Speech at Fourth Summit Conference of Non-aligned Countries” (Algiers, September 9, 1973).
29 Given the ongoing military action supported by the U.S. in Latin America throughout the seventies, this impression of the times was highly deceptive. Indeed, just two days after the summit, the democratically elected socialist president of Chilean Salvador Allende would be ousted and killed in a CIA-backed coup.
30 Rajaratnam, 1973.
31 A.W. Singham and Shirley Hune, Non-alignment in an Age of Alignments (Harare: The College Press, 1986), 47.
32 Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan, “The Normative Relevance of the Bandung Conference for Contemporary Asian and International Order” in Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order, eds. See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 10.
33 United Nations, General Assembly, Resolution 3201, Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, A/RES/3201(S-VI) (May 1, 1974), https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/218450.
34 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, “Speech at the 34th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (New York, September 24, 1979).
For all its forcefulness, Rajaratnam’s speech gained little traction among the delegates of the summit and would have faded into obscurity if not for Bangladeshi artist and filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen’s expansive three-channel film, Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017). Coming over forty years after the speech was made, the film opens pointedly with the Singaporean minister’s prescient remarks on the technical breakdown experienced at the summit. From this infrastructural overture, the narrative moves across multiple decades and locations to recount the passing of an era of Third World solidarities. A key moment is the pivot between the two meetings invoked in the title, namely the 1973 Algiers summit and the 1974 summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Lahore, which is described in the film as a displacement of a socialist-leaning Third World internationalism by a conservative pan-Islamism tethered to a global neoliberal project, at least when seen from Dhaka where the artist is based and which also serves as the site for the metaphorical funeral mentioned in the title. The film does not pretend to exhaust the historical reasons behind this pivot, choosing instead to draw out a chronology of events interspersed with archival footage and contemporary interviews with a cast of intellectual and political figures, but a consistent theme that emerges is how the developmental and redistributional aims of the Movement were overpowered by its galvanizing but ultimately impotent iconology.
This tension is elaborated in the film by putting contemporary footage shot across New York, Algiers and Dhaka at modernist architectures designed to reflect the burgeoning internationalism of the day into dialogue with archival material of the two meetings sourced exclusively from institutional archives. This choice of working through images already suffused with mythic value distinguishes Two Meetings from Mohaiemen’s previous works wherein a focus on marginal figures of the international Left necessitates an archaeological process of discerning figuration from the shattered ruins of a little-known phenomenon.35 Certainly, the narration of a history directed largely by powerful state actors demands something different. Archaeology must give way to a process better described as forensic. That is, of seeking within a set of fully contoured figures traces that might serve as indexical signs of occulted histories or unrealized futures foreclosed by solidarity’s all-consuming iconology in the moment.
At the United Nations headquarters, we see Marxist historian Vijay Prashad at the organization’s old card catalogues wondering aloud about how information on the NIEO, which was voted on by the General Assembly in 1974, would have filled one of the drawers back in the day. He laments that the bold set of demands which never went beyond their formal declaration are now as dusty as these drawers. In Algiers, he is moved by the developmental ambitions expressed by the gigantism of the La Coupole d’Alger Arena constructed by the Brazilian communist architect Oscar Niemeyer. However, he is vexed by its impracticality and strains to identify motifs of the anticolonialism espoused by its makers. From one location to the next, the camera and its protagonists search for such elusive signs inscribed in their environment. Going by the Peircean taxonomy of signs, they thus perform their functions best neither as icons nor as symbols, but as indices. Whereas icons invoke their referents through resemblance and symbols through routinized association, these signs, as indices, are bound to their referents by contiguity and as such are the only signs for which the material world can be given as a direct cause.36 This is what allows them to interrogate the awesome iconic and symbolic force of these monuments and turn our attention instead to the material networks that sustained the internationalist solidarities of the day.
Perhaps this is what accounts for the film’s attachment to being physically present at the sites associated with the internationalism of the day, despite how little public consciousness of their significance has remained. From architecture to furniture to index cards, each of these relics, for all the information provided through their iconic and symbolic value, are sought primarily for their indexical link to a history that today appears so remote that it might even provoke incredulity. Indeed, if icons and symbols depend upon a prior repository of experience to invoke the world, the contiguity that occasions the formation of indices endows them with the unique capacity of opening us towards material histories hitherto unexamined but that have nonetheless constituted the world as such. By this token, the technical breakdown mentioned by Rajaratnam is an exemplary instance of an index where, in the virtual absence of any attendant iconicity and symbolicity, we are alerted to the fact of materiality itself in its crudeness and opacity: something has happened in the world, but we don’t know exactly what it is. As Mary Ann Doane puts it, the index is a “hollowed-out sign”; evacuated of content, it confirms the presence of something but cannot describe it. What therefore follows this “lure of the indexical” is necessarily a kind of “hermeneutic straining”, and a turn towards a supplemental system of signs that can carry out this speculative work.37 And this was why Rajaratnam spoke.
We are now better placed to appreciate the ingenuity of the Singaporean statesman’s intervention in Algiers. It seems that in turning to the technical breakdown, Rajaratnam was summoning the index’s privileged relation to materiality to substantiate his call for a materialist internationalism capable of explicating and rearranging the material networks that continue to prop up the hegemony of the major powers while impoverishing developing nations. That the fault had interrupted the delivery of speech itself further allowed him to deliver his riposte to what he had long perceived to be the moral grandstanding that often took place at such conferences. Spurning the usual rhetoric that attempted to equivocate the struggles of the different peoples represented at the summit under the banners of “anti-imperialism” or “anti-Western,” he chose instead to bring up a material fact that no one in attendance could dispute. Hence, he needed no recourse to analogy to make his argument on the monopolization by the major powers of the material grid upon which virtually all internationalist movements subsisted.
And so it is that, for all the mastery that the towering figures of the Algiers summit like Josip Broz Tito and Fidel Castro had over the discourse centered around the signifiers of “imperialism” and “capitalism,” it was the emissary of the former British port-city spared the worst of imperial rule who came closer to making a materialist critique of the incumbent international order. What’s significant here is how Rajaratnam, by way of his indexical turn towards the material apparatus of the summit itself, decisively shifted the discourse from one focused on “imperialism” and “capitalism” to one that addressed capital. As it was clear to him, the ability to explain the abstract dynamics of imperialism or capitalism did not necessarily allow one to account for the actual circulation of capital in the world.38 Moreover, the reliance on an iconology of collective exploitation to connect the experiences of the vast number of countries in the Movement unevenly touched by the legacy of colonial capitalism, problematic already as it was, was proving increasingly untenable as some countries began climbing the developmental ladder through their participation in global markets, often by pursuing a state-led model of export-oriented industrialization.
Rajaratnam knew this intimately, given that a year before he had delivered a now-historic address in Singapore where he vividly described the city-state as a “global city” by rhetorically “tracing on a map the daily movements of aircraft and ships, the contacts made by telephone and cable and external trade and money transactions.” The complexity of these material flows, at least by the minister’s estimation, exceeded the discourse on capitalism and could only be accounted for by a discursive turn towards the frictions and agencies that determined the movements of these flows along the global “chain of cities” connected “through the tentacles of technology.”39 Time and again, this emergent reality of a globalized world eroding the national or ideological borders that defined the post-war years would be missed by the Movement. Yet, for all its prescience, Rajaratnam’s critique would also soon be uncoupled from any aspiration to Third World solidarity as Singapore’s participation in an increasingly neoliberalized global market meant that the way it “actually” accumulated its capital could only be seen as exemplary of “imperialism” and “capitalism.” Most egregiously, in the eighties, the city-state even reneged on its avowed opposition to the apartheid government of South Africa by becoming a transit hub for the smuggling of arms to the regime.40
But as the archival footage revealed by Mohaiemen shows, many of the delegates were not even listening to Rajaratnam. We know this because many of them would have required interpretation, yet their headphones were on the table.41 But even if they did make the effort, it’s unlikely that they, consumed as they were by an iconology held together by a discourse of equivalence—such as in claiming that American imperialism would be defeated in Latin America as it was beaten in Indochina—would be as taken by a discourse founded on a trace. This is insofar as the indexicality that grants the trace its evidentiary force also imbues it with a hermeneutic openness that calls upon the arduous and infinitely prolonged undertaking of representing the material networks that produce the trace as such. That these networks can be made further opaque by complex legal infrastructures, such as those that today secure Singapore’s status as a regional asset management hub, only adds to the strain. On the occasion of a meeting wherein the attraction was speech’s capacity for immediate representation, the sense of deferral internal to Rajaratnam’s contemplation of networks so vast and all-encompassing as to almost defy representation must have felt like a distraction.
Surely, we shouldn’t forget that the cameras were always rolling, and that it was ultimately to these cameras that the representatives of these nations spoke. The rambunctious crowds that had greeted them upon their arrival in Bandung were now the captive masses gathered on the other end of their televised image. A precursor of today’s digital mediations, the mass media of the previous century, as Walter Benjamin diagnosed, established a stage whereby the leaders would encounter the masses in the moment that the latter were constituted by giving themselves to be seen as an image.42 The difference today with social media is that this circular but non-dialectical return of the image to itself takes place in the absence of a stage as a singular locus for speech, resulting in the self-perception that the people, in seeing themselves speak, have truly become their own mediums.43 If this forgetting of who truly owns the means of meme production today feels farcical, the relation that the leaders of the Movement had to media in their time would be the tragedy as dramatized by Rajaratnam: these leaders, for all their actual and projected power, did not own their mediums.
Looking
35 Vijay Prashad, “Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tragic History of the 1970s Left,” Afterall 47 (Spring/Summer 2019): 56-65.
36 Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 104-15.
37 Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 133.
38 My analysis here is indebted to Ching Kwan Lee’s concept of “varieties of capital.” See Ching Kwan Lee, The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
39 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, “Singapore: Global City” (speech, Singapore Press Club, Feburary 6, 1972).
40 Hennie van Vuuren, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit (London: Hurst, 2018), 434-7.
41 This observation was made by Mohaiemen in a lecture focusing on Rajaratnam’s speech. See Naeem Mohaiemen, “The Shortest Speech” (lecture, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, May 17, 2019).
42 For Benjamin, the medium that best demonstrated this capacity is aerial photography. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1968), 251.
43 Morris notes that the political value of “having a voice” has been displaced by that of “being seen to speak”. She attributes this to the technomediation of today’s protest movements that has allowed “self-expression to substitute for communicative relation.” Morris, 98, 108.
How can we protest the lapsing of the materialist internationalism articulated by a neglected chapter of the NAM in a time when solidarity substantively manifested has never been more urgent? Going by the approach of Two Meetings, it appears that what’s crucial is first sustaining the indexical link between the Movement and what remains of it today. But in its encounters with the architectures that have become the most enduring remnants of the Movement, the film also performs another kind of indexical turn: one oriented not towards historicity and materiality but futurity and possibility. In a sequence set at the Boumedienne University in Algiers, one channel plays contemporary footage of students, presumably walking between classes, while another shows archival footage possibly shot in the seventies of students at what appears to be the same location. The conjunction of the two images might suggest that what is at stake is iconicity, that we are called to look for resemblances, but the voiceover by Algerian publisher Semia Zennadi suggests otherwise. She bemoans how students in Algeria have turned their backs on the Third World and blames it on the lack of transmission between generations. Pan-Africanism, she says, has been reduced to trade relations, so much so that the students don’t even recognize themselves as belonging to the continent. No wonder then that when the BLM movement went viral across the globe a few years after the filming, these students would stand out for their silence on the systemic racism against sub-Saharan Africans in their part of the continent.44 This continental drift that cannot even be bridged by the social justice meme is historicized in the film through the meeting of the two images: for all their resemblances, no line of transmission runs between them.
Still, we are called to look. In fact, by holding its prolonged gaze upon these two scenes at once, the film declares itself to be that line of transmission. This “blind compulsion” of the cinematic frame is thoroughly indexical, yet it lacks the quality of the trace aligned to the that-has-been.45 Instead, this is the index as deixis, as formulated within Peirce’s taxonomy but oft-forgotten in favor of privileging indexicality’s evidentiary force. This second understanding of the index establishes contiguity, however tenuously, by declaring a gap between sign and object that is to be closed with the application of our attention.46 Like a pointed finger or a command to simply look “here,” the cinematic frame, in performing this deictic function, forcibly orients us towards something that nonetheless can only be brought into view through our reciprocal pursuit of the sign. And so we look, between the two images, between “here” and “there,” between “then” and “now,” occupying and somewhat suturing, however partially and momentarily, the gap between them. That is, between the materialist Third World internationalism declared at Algiers in 1973 and a present marked as much by a forgetting of this history as by emergent transnational solidarities seemingly poised to repeat tragedy as farce.
We get an even more sobering sense of this gap towards the end of the film. In its final chapter set in Dhaka, we follow Bangladeshi politician Zonayed Saki on a visit to the Bangabandhu Centre originally constructed for the 1990 NAM summit before its indefinite postponement following the country’s pivot away from the Movement. Unlike most of the other buildings featured in the film, the centre is completely packed due to a trade fair. For a moment, the size of the crowds appears to confirm that the global market has delivered in material terms what the Movement could only invoke as aspiration—Bangladesh, it bears mention, is today one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. But then, we hear the security ordering the crew to switch off their cameras. The image goes black. While sudden, the prohibition comes as no surprise, for it is exactly at the site that claims to reveal a world of material circulations in all its transparency that we mustn’t be allowed to look any further.
This essay was originally developed with support of Made in Public (2022), a writing project initiated by artist Marysia Lewandowska, in collaboration with editorial input from Zian Chen, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
44 “Black Lives Matter skirts North Africa despite everyday racism,” France 24, July 20, 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200720-black-lives-matter-skirts-north-africa-despite-everyday-racism.
45 Peirce, 108. Roland Barthes devised the expression “that-has-been” to describe photography’s authentication of its referent through a separation in time that endows the medium with a necessary sense of belatedness. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77.
46 Doane, 136.
1 The free speech zone known as Speakers’ Corner located in a public park in downtown Singapore is the only space in the city-state where protests can be lawfully held without a permit.
2 In July 2019, an advertisement featuring a Chinese actor putting on “brownface” to play Malay and Indian characters was heavily criticized for its racial insensitivity. Subsequently, a rap video produced by YouTube comedian Preeti Nair and rapper Subhas Nair lampooning the advertisement attracted even more controversy when it was investigated by the police for incendiary rhetoric. For a concise account and analysis of the events, see Ruby Thiagarajan, “Brownface and Racism in Singapore,” New Narratif, August 1, 2019, https://newnaratif.com/journalism/brownface-and-racism-in-singapore/.
3 While the term “woke” originated in African American slang as a variation of “awake,” it is used today more generally to refer to a condition of being conscious of social justice issues, especially where it relates to race, gender and sexuality. As a term which gained currency through its circulation on social media, its changing connotations have been shaped by its weaponization in the online “culture wars” of recent years. See Aja Romano, “A history of ‘wokeness’,” Vox, October 9, 2020, https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy.
4 In Singapore, the use of “champagne socialist” as a derogatory term for persons of middle to upper class upbringing who espouse socially progressive causes was popularized by Calvin Cheng, a prominent online commentator and supporter of the ruling government. Apart from Cheng, Critical Spectator, a Facebook page ran by a Polish expatriate in Singapore, was especially vociferous in its critique of the BLM movement and its influence on the younger generation in Singapore.
5 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (London: Zero Books, 2017), 68.
6 See, for example, Fatima Bhutto, “Crazy Rich Asians is no racial triumph. It’s a soulless salute to the 1%,” The Guardian, September 12, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/sep/12/crazy-rich-asians-racial-triumph, and Mark Tseng-Putterman, “One Way That Crazy Rich Asians Is a Step Backward,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/asian-americas-great-gatsby-moment/568213/.
7 See, for example, Kirsten Han, “Crazy Rich Asians is a win for Asian Americans. But it gets Singapore wrong,” Vox, August 17, 2018, https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/17/17715124/crazy-rich-asians-movie-singapore, and Pooja Nansi, “Crazy Rich Asians is one of our saddest moments,” Inkstone, August 22, 2018, https://www.inkstonenews.com/opinion/pooja-nansi-crazy-rich-asians-hailed-representative-it-ignores-people-singapore/article/2160802.
8 Jerrine Tan, “Asian Male Sexuality, the Money-Phallus, and Why Asian Americans Need to Stop Calling Crazy Rich Asians the Asian Black Panther,” Medium, September 1, 2018, https://medium.com/@jerrinetan/asian-male-sexuality-the-money-phallus-and-why-asian-americans-need-to-stop-calling-crazy-rich-e296abb77231.
9 Kirsten Han, “Hollywood Has No Time for Crazy Poor Asians,” Foreign Policy, August 17, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/17/hollywood-has-no-time-for-crazy-poor-asians/.
10 Rosalind C. Morris, “Theses on the New Öffentlichkeit,” Grey Room 51 (Spring 2018): 96.
11 The ruling People’s Action Party has governed the country continuously since it achieved self-governance in 1959.
12 The Asian Dollar Market is a regional market for deposits denominated in US dollars. It was established to leverage Singapore’s favorable time zone that allowed transactions to take place between the closing of American markets and the opening of markets in Europe on the next day. See J.J. Woo, Singapore as an International Finance Centre: History, Policy and Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 45.
13 While risks are certainly borne by those who speculate on these assets, there is a significant asymmetry in terms of who bears the fallout in the event of a default. The stakes are especially high in the financialization of the housing market. While among speculators there will always be winners and losers depending on the “bet” placed on the home, homeowners face certain eviction when they cannot meet their mortgage obligations. See Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 125.
14 Sassen, 128.
15 Jerome Couturier, Davide Sola and Paul Stonham, “Are sovereign funds ‘white knights’?” Qualitative Research in Financial Markets 1, no. 3 (2009): 142–51.
16 See, for example, Elvin K. Wyly, Mona Atia, Elizabeth Lee and Pablo Mendez, “Race, gender, and statistical representation: predatory mortgage lending and the US community reinvestment movement,” Environment and Planning A 39 (2007): 2139-2166.
17 Laura Hyun Yi Kang, “The Uses of Asianization: Figuring Crises, 1997-98 and 2007-?,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 2012): 411.
18 Ibid, 428-9.
19 Rick Carew, P.R. Venkat and Costas Paris, “Citi Bailout Also Bails Out Singapore Fund,” The Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2009.
20 Morris, 106.
21 It bears mention that MBS is never officially referred to as a casino resort, with “integrated resort” being the devised alternative.
22 Lee Kah-Wee, Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019), 234-6.
23 As Lee observes, what’s further established by this vision is the establishment of a synecdoche whereby “the Integrated Resort stands for Marina Bay in the same way that Marina Bay stands for Singapore as a whole.” See Lee, 222.
24 “Ministry aims for a city revival,” Business Times, January 5, 1979.
25 William S.W. Lim, “The Quality of Urban Life: With Special Reference To Developing Countries,” Asian Journal of Social Science 1, no. 1 (1973): 81-96.
26 Given their focus on the unequal distribution of wealth, there is little to suggest the racialization of the ghetto by urban planners in Singapore. Nonetheless, the discursive turn in the seventies towards a comparative methodology would see the ghetto consistently described as a site of local policy failure so as to bring out the successes of the Singapore model. This was a marked divergence from the discourse during the 1967 Afro-Asian Housing Congress that tended to attribute the housing crisis in the region not to problematic local governance but to the rapid urbanization that was understood as a universal condition of modernity. See Chia Poteik, “Afro-Asian Builder’s Manual,” The Straits Times, October 15, 1967.
27 The trajectory is based on Vijay Prashad’s history of Third World internationalism. See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007).
28 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, “Speech at Fourth Summit Conference of Non-aligned Countries” (Algiers, September 9, 1973).
29 Given the ongoing military action supported by the U.S. in Latin America throughout the seventies, this impression of the times was highly deceptive. Indeed, just two days after the summit, the democratically elected socialist president of Chilean Salvador Allende would be ousted and killed in a CIA-backed coup.
30 Rajaratnam, 1973.
31 A.W. Singham and Shirley Hune, Non-alignment in an Age of Alignments (Harare: The College Press, 1986), 47.
32 Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan, “The Normative Relevance of the Bandung Conference for Contemporary Asian and International Order” in Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order, eds. See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 10.
33 United Nations, General Assembly, Resolution 3201, Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, A/RES/3201(S-VI) (May 1, 1974), https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/218450.
34 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, “Speech at the 34th Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (New York, September 24, 1979).
35 Vijay Prashad, “Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tragic History of the 1970s Left,” Afterall 47 (Spring/Summer 2019): 56-65.
36 Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 104-15.
37 Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 133.
38 My analysis here is indebted to Ching Kwan Lee’s concept of “varieties of capital.” See Ching Kwan Lee, The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
39 Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, “Singapore: Global City” (speech, Singapore Press Club, Feburary 6, 1972).
40 Hennie van Vuuren, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit (London: Hurst, 2018), 434-7.
41 This observation was made by Mohaiemen in a lecture focusing on Rajaratnam’s speech. See Naeem Mohaiemen, “The Shortest Speech” (lecture, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, May 17, 2019).
42 For Benjamin, the medium that best demonstrated this capacity is aerial photography. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1968), 251.
43 Morris notes that the political value of “having a voice” has been displaced by that of “being seen to speak”. She attributes this to the technomediation of today’s protest movements that has allowed “self-expression to substitute for communicative relation.” Morris, 98, 108.
44 “Black Lives Matter skirts North Africa despite everyday racism,” France 24, July 20, 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200720-black-lives-matter-skirts-north-africa-despite-everyday-racism.
45 Peirce, 108. Roland Barthes devised the expression “that-has-been” to describe photography’s authentication of its referent through a separation in time that endows the medium with a necessary sense of belatedness. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77.
46 Doane, 136.
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Author
Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, his research examines systems of governance in a global age. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien; Singapore Art Museum; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
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