Postcolonial Spatiality

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which Singapore’s geographically inflected condition finds its way onto the national cinema’s expressive palette. It examines the country’s spatial epistemology from its historical origins as an island and colonial port city, to the modern state’s management of urban development and land scarcity. Singapore’s real and imagined relationship to British colonial rule exerts a structural influence, and impresses itself onto the architecture of its built environment, infrastructural design, and artistic production. Inspired by Tom Conley’s Cartographic Cinema, this study defines the national hermeneutic that results, through the discovery of pregnant codes and signs, along with activated signals of direction and scale. Singapore’s postcolonial identity thus infuses feature and short filmmaking with spatial discourse in three forms: aerial cartography, affective maps, and colonial atlases.