Identity Politics and Cultural Asymmetries: Singaporean Transmigrants ‘Fashioning’ Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

The politics of identity and difference are often intensely experienced and negotiated in everyday encounters. By examining the experiences of highly skilled Singaporean transmigrants in London and their projects of cosmopolitan self-fashioning, this paper highlights the way in which ‘race’ and nationality trouble claims to cosmopolitanism. In the analysis I consider the mixing of cultures and selective ‘local’ norms picked up by this group of migrants. I focus on the oscillating cultural framings that they navigate in their professional and social interactions, particularly in terms of phenotype, cultural discourse and bodily presentations. In so doing, I argue for a more critical view towards popular notions of cosmopolitanism currently in circulation and instead invoke an alternative cosmopolitan urbanism.

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