In August 2011, many Singaporean citizens grabbed their cooking pots and used the city‐state's national obsession with food to express growing dissatisfaction with immigration and integration trends. The ‘cook and share a pot of curry’ event—a local response to Chinese newcomers complaining about the smell of their Indian Singaporean neighbours’ food—is significant for its use of smell to catalyse a collective citizen reaction and for its reliance on contemporary social media. By analysing this event, we intend to (1) conceptualize the role of smell and viscera in framing citizenship; (2) understand how smells shed light on the city‐state's contemporary ethnic politics and sense of national identity; and (3) reframe the significance of curry day as an expression of visceral citizenship that complements how the state frames Singaporean citizenry. We maintain that curry day sheds light on a specific dimension of Singaporean citizenship, as it uses smell, viscera and embodied activism to mobilize against rationalistic state‐defined distinctions between local and international concerns, economic objectives and social cohesion, inter‐racial harmony and national identity.

No abstract