About
A series of HYBRID PRESENTATIONS, SCREENINGS, AND A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ABOUT OTHERNESS IN SINGAPORE—PAST, PRESENT, AND OTHERWISE. Happening April 2023.
The Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore is known for being exceptionally multiracial, multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious, and many commentators insist that a Singaporean can look or sound like anything. However, in practice, this potentially boundless difference is regimented, simplified, and constrained in various ways. Participants in this series will ask: what does it mean to be other in global Singapore—whether officially or not? Participants will share reflections from their research, creative and professional practice, activism, and advocacy focused on otherness — official and unofficial, both their own and/or others’.
Singapore’s broad spectrum of difference is managed in multiple ways, most notably through CMIO: a state-backed racial and linguistic model that categorizes the population into Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other groups. As the name suggests, “Other” occupies a fraught status. It’s administratively capacious but isn’t a category of affiliation or identification: a Singaporean might say “I am Chinese/Malay/Indian(-Singaporean),” but they wouldn’t say, “I am Other.” The official status of “Other” also doesn’t exhaust the many forms of difference, abjection, or alterity that people might experience in Singapore based on gender identity, sexuality, citizenship, dis/ability, ancestry, language, religion, mode of employment, etc., whether self-attributed or imputed by others. By focusing on “doing being,” this series will explore the situated, embodied performances out of which “being” — and being other — emerges.