Seeing (or perceiving) difference in multiracial Singapore: Habits of looking in a raciolinguistic image economy

Abstract

This article examines the habits of looking that mediate perception in the self‐consciously multiracial Southeast Asian island city‐state of Singapore. I propose looking as a concept for understanding how perceivers work to transform ambiguous, ambivalent encounters with difference into determinate, visibly self‐evident encounters with race. I argue that, in Singapore, habits of looking get materialized via a visual epistemology of race: as efforts to know others by knowing their race through multimodal assemblages of signs, with vision located at the apex of hierarchies of perceptual modalities. I examine informal interactions, state‐produced media, and online commentary to show how language, race, and perception get co‐naturalized (Rosa and Flores, 2017) in an asymmetrically power‐laden image economy (Halliday, 2018; Poole, 1997). I show how looking enables perceivers to see through the eyes of authoritative others and track how hierarchies among perceivers get continually reproduced and revalorized despite continual failures on their own terms.

Voicing singlish from the “middle”: Indexical hybridities of class, race, language, and Singaporeanness

“…This racial organizing framework works not just as a governing and nation‐building tool, but has been ingrained as a form of predefined racialized hybridity representing a multiracial and multicultural Singapore. The CMIO model also becomes the foundation on which raciolanguage communities are naturalized, where one's “race” is ideologically tied to the possession of a standardized “Mother Tongue language” (Babcock, 2022a). Thus, while divisions in social class are rendered invisible or erased, racial and linguistic differentiations have historically been more salient, albeit in limited and prescriptive formulations.…”