Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore
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Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Seok Yeng Beverly Fok IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jean M. Langford July 2020 © Seok Yeng Beverly Fok 2020 Acknowledgements BAD DEBT a ledger For the lessons in how to read rigorously, which is also to say generously— Jean Langford Stuart McLean Serra Hakyemez Ajay Skaria Cesare Casarino Hoon Song For the lessons of another kind, friendship— Milica Milić-Kolarević Amirpouyan Shiva Samarjit Ghosh Deniz Çoral Britt Van Paepeghem Elif Kalaycıoğlu Arif Hayat Nairang Tracey Blasenheim Misha Hadar Harsha Anantharaman Shai Gortler For their bracing works, to which this work is a response— Anoma Pieris Charles Lim Desiree Leong i For the means to read, write, and (when needed) idle about— The University of Minnesota’s Department of Anthropology College of Liberal Arts Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change The Joseph E. Schwartzberg Workable World Trust The American Council of Learned Societies And for teaching me the essentials— My parents, my brother, and my sister ii Abstract After fifty years of aggressive augmentation, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of sea, this artificial land aspires to cut the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). How to analytically capture that gesture of self-authoring? From what vantage point does one study an object like reclamation whose structure is that of recursion? This is the challenge—at once methodological and theoretical—to which my dissertation responds. I proceed first by asking: what exactly is being reclaimed in reclamation? Why should the creation of “new” land need to be enacted in the idiom of a “re,” that is, as a re-taking, a retrieval, or a return? Though reclamation purports to create land “from sea,” key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand and labor, both of which Singapore imports in vast quantities from its South, East, and Southeast Asian neighbors. Harnessing those flows, reclamation would appear to put the very ground itself in motion. Foreign coastlines are dismantled, ferried piecemeal, then reassembled into new land in Singapore by migrant workers on barges. In the process, land paradoxically becomes chattel. What then becomes of chattel—including certain forms of labor? A tentative answer might be obtained, I argue, by looking to the legal and labor histories that inform this present-day fabrication of mobile land. Thus the dissertation rehabilitates a link between today’s migrant labor and its earlier prefiguration, colonial convict labor, which was first tasked with creating new land in the island’s interior. Just as today’s reclaimed land needs labor’s upkeep to fend off the tides, interior land needed constant servicing to prevent its return to the jungle. Where convict labor’s lot was “imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life,” reclamation workers, confined in vessels, trace an unending circuit between dredge sites at sea and fill sites near land. By situating reclamation within those longer-standing political economies of extraction, I show that mobile land—made here to be eternally remade against rising seas—is not “new” and cannot be claimed, but rather must always be re-claimed, even in the very first instance. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract iii List of Figures v 0 Postscript 1 1 Short Measure 11 2 Ground’s Keepers 42 3 Cut and Dried: Prefigured Land 77 4 Misanthropology: A Method 108 Bibliography 130 iv List of Figures Figure 0.1 Proclamations published in the Gazette, one electronically in 2020, the other in print in 1971. National Library of Singapore. 3 Figure 0.2 Reproduction of a Proclamation. Charles Lim. 2019. Print image. Companion piece to SEA STATE 9: proclamation garden. In Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden commission: Charles Lim Yi Yong, edited by Adele Tan. 5 Figure 0.3 Stills from Charles Lim’s SEA STATE 9: proclamation: drag drop pour (2018). 8 Figure 1.1 Unterbrochene Straßenmessung auf Singapore (Interrupted Road Surveying in Singapore). Heinrich Leutemann. c. 1865. Wood engraving. National Museum of Singapore. 16 Figure 1.2 “Pandak the Were-Tiger (on the Right): (Ulu Kelantan.).” Frank Fortescue Laidlaw. n.d. Photograph. In Walter William Skeat. 1906. Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, Vol. 2, p. 228. 23 Figure 3.1 “Beach at the Foot of Mount Palmer, Showing Chinese Digging Cockles.” G. R. Lambert & Co. c. 1880. National Archives of Singapore. 78 Figure 3.2 “A Global City Built on Foreign Soil.” Lino Moser and Gabriela Schär. 2013. Construction of Territory. 85 Figure 3.3 “Mount Palmer. Navy Cut on West Side. (Received with Resident Engineer’s Service Letter Dated 27 June 1912).” Institution of Civil Engineers (Great Britain). n.d. National Archives of Singapore. 86 v Figure 3.4 Still from an untitled video by Mother Nature Cambodia (Facebook). Oct 8, 2016. 88 Figure 4.1 Bus Stop. Mike H. J. Chang. 2016. Art installation. State of Motion exhibition. Photograph by Mike H. J. Chang. 109 Figure 4.2 Bus Stop. Mike H. J. Chang. 2016. Art installation. State of Motion exhibition. Photograph by Mike H. J. Chang. 109 Figure 4.3 Stills from Mat Sentol’s Mat Tiga Suku (1964). Complied by Toh Hun Ping for SG Film Hunter (blog). 113 Figure 4.4 “Sketch of Bus Stop.” Mike H. J. Chang. 2016. In State of Motion program booklet, edited by the Asian Film Archive. 114 Figure 4.5 Still from Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined (2018). The body of Ajit. 122 Figure 4.6 Stills from Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined (2018). An exchange between Lok and his partner. 124 Figure 4.7 Stills from Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined (2018). Wang’s conversation with TROLL862 “taking place” in between the levels of Counter-Strike. 126 vi 0 POSTSCRIPT After the writing, after the signature. What comes after… post scriptum? Every parcel of land in Singapore that was once “reclaimed” from foreshore or seabed presumably has, tucked away in the concavities of the Land Authority’s offices, a corresponding proclamation. Each of those documents, by rehearsing a set textual formula1, would have at some point bestowed upon a newly made plot of land its unimpeachable landness and affirmed its belonging to the State (C. Lim 2015). Each doubtless had been effective: the land is there for all to see. And yet all are incomplete. Not one of those proclamations, so far as I can tell, bears an authorizing signature—only the place of it. Thus effaced in the archival traces of land’s authoring is any mark or trace of the one who might be said to have authored. From those unsigned pages one gleans a most startling proposition: here perhaps is a land that writes itself. So presents the problem of the post scriptum. For what lies in the wake of the auto-graph’s (lit. the tracing of the self) retreat from its place on the page? What form will subsequent writings—authorings—about land and its “reclamation” have to have taken? Here is one possibility: an entire dissertation in the genre of a postscript. Or, better, in the form of an exergue—that meager inscription appended below the principle emblem of a coin or medal, of the sort that so fascinated Jacques Derrida, lying as it does hors d’œuvre: outside the body of work but also inside it, given that the inscription is what furnishes the order, the “lexicon,” which will have made the œuvre possible in the first place (1996, 7). Note the tense. It is a recursive one. The writing partakes of the structure of that which it describes. This is, after all, a reclamation. Where then to begin? 1 “Whereas … And whereas … Now, therefore, I do declare that the said piece of land shall … be State land.” 1 In the Afterwards Stuart McLean, writing after the Event of the Great Famine in Ireland, finds his appropriate point of departure not in “the classical punctuality of in medias res, but [in] the more vexed and asymmetrical space of hindsight” (2004, 2). It is a formulation I quite like, chronically tardy as I am. Yet the belatedness with which I presently attempt to write—here, about reclamation—is complicated by the fact that “the event” in question seems hardly an event at all. For one thing, it lacks positive content, comprising only the withdrawal of the gesture of self-tracing which would have otherwise bound body to word, being to logos. And because no one is ever called to bear witness to that withdrawal, we are unable to say when it is that the event actually took place—only that it has and that it is bound to repeat, with the next issuance of a proclamation and the next and the next, so long as land remains available for the State’s “retaking.” Hence while we find ourselves perennial latecomers, perpetually chasing after the event, equally we are doomed to always arrive prematurely, ahead of the next occasion when the signature will again take its leave from the page. This ill-timing of ours puts us not “in the middle” of it all, however. (There is anyway no middle to repetition.) Instead the pattern of our arrival is at once too early and too late.2 Thus mired in that temporal structure, we proceed then to “recollect forward” “what did not yet happen as what had already happened” (Copjec 2012, 37; my emphasis).