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Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histor...

Fok, Seok Yeng Beverly.

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Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore./
Author:	Fok, Seok Yeng Beverly.
Published:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2020,
Description:	146 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-04, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International82-04A.
Subject:	Cultural anthropology. -
Online resource:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=28086648
ISBN:	9798672150512

Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore.
Fok, Seok Yeng Beverly.

Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2020 - 146 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-04, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Minnesota, 2020.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

After fifty years of aggressive augmentation, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore's total landmass. Cut out of sea, this artificial land aspires to cut the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). How to analytically capture that gesture of self-authoring? From what vantage point does one study an object like reclamation whose structure is that of recursion? This is the challenge-at once methodological and theoretical-to which my dissertation responds.I proceed first by asking: what exactly is being reclaimed in reclamation? Why should the creation of "new" land need to be enacted in the idiom of a "re," that is, as a re-taking, a retrieval, or a return? Though reclamation purports to create land "from sea," key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand and labor, both of which Singapore imports in vast quantities from its South, East, and Southeast Asian neighbors. Harnessing those flows, reclamation would appear to put the very ground itself in motion. Foreign coastlines are dismantled, ferried piecemeal, then reassembled into new land in Singapore by migrant workers on barges. In the process, land paradoxically becomes chattel. What then becomes of chattel-including certain forms of labor?A tentative answer might be obtained, I argue, by looking to the legal and labor histories that inform this present-day fabrication of mobile land. Thus the dissertation rehabilitates a link between today's migrant labor and its earlier prefiguration, colonial convict labor, which was first tasked with creating new land in the island's interior. Just as today's reclaimed land needs labor's upkeep to fend off the tides, interior land needed constant servicing to prevent its return to the jungle. Where convict labor's lot was "imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life," reclamation workers, confined in vessels, trace an unending circuit between dredge sites at sea and fill sites near land. By situating reclamation within those longer-standing political economies of extraction, I show that mobile land-made here to be eternally remade against rising seas-is not "new" and cannot be claimed, but rather must always be re-claimed, even in the very first instance.

ISBN: 9798672150512Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122764
Cultural anthropology.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Labor

Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore.
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300 $a 146 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-04, Section: A.
500 $a Advisor: Langford, Jean M.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Minnesota, 2020.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
520 $a After fifty years of aggressive augmentation, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore's total landmass. Cut out of sea, this artificial land aspires to cut the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). How to analytically capture that gesture of self-authoring? From what vantage point does one study an object like reclamation whose structure is that of recursion? This is the challenge-at once methodological and theoretical-to which my dissertation responds.I proceed first by asking: what exactly is being reclaimed in reclamation? Why should the creation of "new" land need to be enacted in the idiom of a "re," that is, as a re-taking, a retrieval, or a return? Though reclamation purports to create land "from sea," key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand and labor, both of which Singapore imports in vast quantities from its South, East, and Southeast Asian neighbors. Harnessing those flows, reclamation would appear to put the very ground itself in motion. Foreign coastlines are dismantled, ferried piecemeal, then reassembled into new land in Singapore by migrant workers on barges. In the process, land paradoxically becomes chattel. What then becomes of chattel-including certain forms of labor?A tentative answer might be obtained, I argue, by looking to the legal and labor histories that inform this present-day fabrication of mobile land. Thus the dissertation rehabilitates a link between today's migrant labor and its earlier prefiguration, colonial convict labor, which was first tasked with creating new land in the island's interior. Just as today's reclaimed land needs labor's upkeep to fend off the tides, interior land needed constant servicing to prevent its return to the jungle. Where convict labor's lot was "imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life," reclamation workers, confined in vessels, trace an unending circuit between dredge sites at sea and fill sites near land. By situating reclamation within those longer-standing political economies of extraction, I show that mobile land-made here to be eternally remade against rising seas-is not "new" and cannot be claimed, but rather must always be re-claimed, even in the very first instance.
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650 4 $a Southeast Asian studies. $3 3344898
653 $a Labor
653 $a Reclaimed land
653 $a Law
653 $a Political Economy
653 $a Labor histories
653 $a Singapore
653 $a Reclamation workers
690 $a 0326
690 $a 0222
710 2 $a University of Minnesota. $b Anthropology. $3 1670862
773 0 $t Dissertations Abstracts International $g 82-04A.
790 $a 0130
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2020
793 $a English
856 4 0 $u https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=28086648