Ghostly topographies: landscape and biopower in modern Singapore

Abstract

This paper considers the history of a single landscape in the Chinatown district of modern Singapore, one with a complex and uneasy history. This area was formerly home to a number of female labour collectives, bulldozed in 1969 to make way for new development that never arrived. The author attempts to explain this site in reference to a broader politico-ecological history of landscape construction in Singapore, in which a state landscape was constructed that would confine a number of subjects to the fringe of the broader society. Through a number of practices and performances involving ghosts and haunting, it is argued, these landscapes become open to powerful new forms of contestation that evade the techniques of a regime of ‘biopower’.