Smell this: Singapore's curry day and visceral citizenship

Abstract

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.

Unruly waters: exploring the embodied dimension of an urban flood in Bangkok through materiality, affect and emotions

“…Work on urban smellscapes (e.g. Caleb and Hayden, 2014;Montsion and Tan, 2016), for example, focuses on the senses to illustrate what we can learn (socially, culturally and politically) by broadening our appreciation of embodied knowledge productions. Yet, as the research for this project was conducted several years after the 2011 flood, between 2015 and 2016, the paper mostly relies on semi-structured interviews.…”

“…(Gregg and Seigworth, 2010:1) Importantly, affect thus names the properties that exceed conscious knowing and engages more directly with bodily experiences and the senses. Olfaction (Press and Stevenc, 2000;Caleb and Hayden, 2014;Montsion and Tan, 2016), for example, has been explored in (urban) geography to better understand how the body engages with its surroundings and is affected by them. Moreover, the appreciation of affect as a mediating force between our material surroundings and humans can be found in ethnographic research.…”

Eating to become ‘good’ citizens: exploring the visceral biopolitics of eating in Singapore

“…As seen from Montsion and Tan's study on the visceral qualities of citizenship, a critical analysis of public opinions is arguably considered a strength, rather than a shortcoming, in gathering the myriad of affective engagements with the state management of food and eating-'especially the extreme, emotional and excessive ones'. 39 Instead of attributing too much democratic agency to public forums, however, I maintain that news forums ultimately enable readers to add their voices in discussions on what constitutes good and proper eating, although these voices remain embedded within broader conventions of mass media. Nevertheless, analysing public forums presents a critical opportunity in illuminating the more-than-representational aspects of eating that are often overlooked or defined in a certain way in dominant dietary discourses.…”

Co-opted Marginality and Social Media in Singapore

“…Ever since then, community news sites on social media (Mothership, Stomp, etc.) continue to feature occurrences of rows involving typically self-entitled and well-off foreigners that disrespect locals or local rules [15].…”