Organizer: Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University

Type/Location: In Person / Ithaca, NY

Description:

What distinctions are desirable? What do distinctions desire? This talk revisits W.J.T. Mitchell’s famous provocation in “What do pictures want?” (2005), ethnographically exploring the infrastructures of experience (Gilmore 2023) that shape the felt necessity of and desires for raciolinguistic distinctiveness (Babcock 2023; Rosa and Flores 2017; Lo and Chun 2020) in Singapore in the aftermath of “Asian Values,” multiply institutionalized “Mother Tongue” pedagogies, and the global rise of place-branding regimes. Against arguments of cruel optimism—a desire for things that are obstacles to one’s flourishing (Berlant 2011)—and Singaporeanness-as-absence (Chua 1998), I show how racial community gets performed, policed, and blocked through everyday communicative activity amid three-dimensional fictions (Watson 2011) of multiracial-multilingualism as national identity. I elaborate a desire-based framework (Tuck and Yang 2014) that moves beyond totalizing images and foregrounds the horizons toward which people in Singapore strive even when working through totalizing images—acts of striving that imagine new horizons beyond the coercive community ideals that uphold and are upheld by genres of postcolonial capitalism (Naruse 2023) in the island city-state and beyond.

About the speaker:

Joshua Babcock is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Linguistics and STS at Brown University. His current book project, Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinctions in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore explores how technology, language, and race co-naturalize one another across scales to shape the conditions of possibility for belonging to the image of Singapore. In his emerging work, he studies the Singapore Sling, U.S. school board politics (with Ilana Gershon), and a ghost town called Singapore, Michigan. Josh is also the Communications Director for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association.

Registration link:

To attend the event in person, please register here.