Chronotopes of ‘Chinese’ privilege: Class-inflected racialisation in condominium hoardings

Abstract

This article explores racial ‘privilege’ through the lens of temporalized landscapes. Specifically, I examine chronotopes of class-inflected ‘Chinese’ privilege on advertising hoardings for ‘Jadescape’, a condominium development in multiracial Singapore. Two chronotopic dimensions are discussed. The first, pertaining to representations inscribed on the hoardings, manifest a ‘chronotopic bricolage’, involving the fusion of a ‘traditional racial-cultural chronotope’ of a historicised ‘Chineseness’, and a ‘modern cosmopolitan chronotope’ of contemporariness and transnationalism. Embedded in this mix are further multiplicities of time, which altogether create a Sinocentric ‘neo-traditional’ aesthetic. The second dimension relates to the impermanence of the semiotic-materiality of the hoardings installed along the perimeter of the construction site only while the condominium is being built. The temporariness of hyper-visible representability of ‘Chineseness’, read against other similar media and communication practices in multiracial public spaces, secures a ‘semiotic-material immunity of privilege’, which renders racialized Chinese privilege in Singapore both elusive and normalised. (Chronotopes of privilege, ‘Chinese privilege’, ‘chronotopic bricolage’, neo-traditional aesthetic, condominium advertising, critical semiotic landscape studies)*