Writing Past Colonialism – serie

During the nineteenth century, Singapore was established as a free port of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company's Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary experimental site for the colonial plural society and convicts were graduated by race and the labor needed for urban construction. ""Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes"" investigates how a political system aimed at managing ethnic communities in the larger material context of the colonial urban project was first imagined and tested through the physical segregation of the colonial prison. A description of the evolution of the ideal plan for a plural city across three settlements is followed by a detailed look at Singapore's colonial prison. Chapters trace the prison's development and its dissolution across the urban landscape through the penal labor system. The author demonstrates the way in which racial politics were inscribed spatially in the division of penal facilities and how the map of the city was reconfigured through convict labor. Later chapters describe penal resistance first through intimate stories of penal life and then through a discussion of organized resistance in festival riots.

We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple; the geometry of our embodied lives is curviform, meandering, bi-pedal. Our personal worlds are timed, inter-positional, and contingent. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This, ""Dark Writing"" argues, is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. How can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans?

We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple; the geometry of our embodied lives is curviform, meandering, bi-pedal. Our personal worlds are timed, inter-positional, and contingent. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This, ""Dark Writing"" argues, is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. How can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans?