Jean Michel Montsion

No Good Deed Goes Unrewarded: The Values/Virtues of Transnational Volunteerism in Neoliberal Capital

This article focuses on the value of volunteering in producing, sustaining and legitimising forms of subjectivity and social relations congruent with the ethos of neoliberal capital. Rather than treat it as a spontaneous act of virtue, we insist that volunteerism is a carefully designed technology of government the purpose of which is to align individual conduct with neoliberal capitals double injunction of market rationality and social responsibility. To this end we investigate two complementary case studies of transnational volunteerism, one dealing with Chinese international students volunteering in Vancouver seeking to obtain Canadian citizenship, the other looking at Western university students and graduates volunteering in Ghana to gather relevant professional skills and experience. In both cases we find that transnational volunteerism helps participating individuals assume cultural skills, affective competencies and citizenship prerogatives they could otherwise not have claimed through nationality or employment.

When talent meets mobility: un/desirability in Singapore's new citizenship project

Singapores marketing strategy as a ‘gateway’ between East and West, a project developed at the end of the 1990s, is based on the city–states re-positioning in the knowledge-based economy between an emerging China and Western societies. This project targets elite populations whether they are locals or migrants to frame a citizenship design combining mobility and talent. I will critically assess the impacts of Singapores gateway strategies on the formation of citizens–subjects through the notion of un/desirability. By focusing on stories of desirable subjects, I will stress the everyday tensions arising in the production of neo-liberal citizens. I argue that desirable subjects are struggling with the neo-liberal pressures to become ‘self-governed entrepreneurs’ at the gateway, which is symptomatic of schisms between the city–states citizenship project and their own practice. I especially target the crucial role of community associations in mediating these tensions and supporting the city–states citizenship project.

A Critique of Everyday International Relations: The Case of Cultural Pluralism in Singapore and Vancouver

In the context of Singapore and Vancouver strategically repositioning themselves as gateway cities between Asian and North American markets, I focus on Singapores multiracialism and Vancouvers multiculturalism to frame how people encounter ‘the international’ along racialized and cultural lines in their daily lives. Building on an emerging appetite for everyday life theory in international relations, I look at Henri Lefebvres work on alienation to explore how cultural pluralism policies structure everyday life through what I call ‘everyday borders of the international’. This will reveal how the interrelationships between daily life, political platforms like these policies, and broader political and economic structures shape different everyday encounters of the international.

Patrolling Chineseness: Singapore’s Kowloon Club and the ethnic adaptation of Hong Kongese to Singaporean society

In combination with their strategy to recruit foreign talent, Singaporean state authorities have increasingly focused their attention on community integration schemes for Chinese professional newcomers. The government facilitated such integration with the creation of the Kowloon Club in 1990. The Kowloon Club is not only a government experiment that has been repeated three times since then, but also the only new migrant association that does not explicitly target Mainlanders. Through in-depth interviews with the Club’s leadership, I explore the ethnic adaptation of the Kowloon Club membership as it negotiates the evolving sense of Chineseness found in state designs and Singaporean society. Much like the emergence of the 1997 Hong Kongese identity, the Kowloon Club’s activities have shifted in strong reaction to the racialized category put forth by state authorities and embodied by Mainlander professionals in that the Club’s activities now symbolize and help patrol what Chineseness means as everyday performance in the city-state.

Chinese ethnicities in neoliberal Singapore? State designs and dialect(ical) struggles of community associations

Since the late 1990s, Singaporean state authorities have been increasingly marketing the city state as a knowledge-based hub between mainland China and western societies. Their focus on Mandarin-speaking mainlanders contrasts with Singapores historical Chinese roots. By investigating the daily activities of Hokkien and Teochew community associations, I argue that these associations are finding ways to adapt to state initiatives that market a China-centric identity and target mainlanders. These dialect-based associations try to profit from state designs, while at the same time reclaiming their own historical distinctiveness. Drawing on qualitative work, I document the temporal practices of local dialect-based associations in reaction to neoliberal state initiatives that reduce Chineseness to a de-historicized skill set and stress how state–community interactions shape evolving Chinese ethnicities of the city state.

Transforming an international organization: norm confusion and the International Olympic Committee

The progress of the Olympic Movement as a premier international organization has increasingly garnered the prestige and influence accorded to other liberal institutions such as the United Nations (UN). The International Olympic Committee (IOC)s permanent observer status within the UN raises questions about its seemingly unpredictable decisions and the IOCs incorporation of widely accepted norms within the UN system such as gender equality and sustainable development. In this paper, we present a model highlighting the normative pressures of the IOCs premier status and the subsequent confusion that stems from inherent tensions between three normative arenas that have emerged within the organization over the last century: transnationalism, domesticity and corporatism.

The Little Nyonya and Singapore’s national self: reflections on aesthetics, ethnicity and postcolonial state formation

ABSTRACT Singapore’s postcolonial state formation process has combined the appeal/distress of a multiracial society with the nationalistic pride of economic development. In recent years, the city-state has witnessed a revival of Peranakan culture and history, referring to the descendants of early Chinese immigrants who integrated into Indigenous societies before becoming prized mediators for British colonisers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We question how these references are strategically deployed as part of the process of postcolonial state formation and how their aesthetic representations support public discussions and debates about what defines contemporary (Chinese) Singaporean identity. By examining Peranakan representations in the television series The Little Nyonya from a Deleuzian perspective, it will be argued that Peranakan history and culture are mobilised to de-territorialise previous meanings of national ethnic markers, specifically Chineseness, and to re-territorialise a local sense of Indigeneity. In reaction to concerns over Mainlander identity, representations of Peranakan culture and history in The Little Nyonya support the indigenisation of a specific Chinese identity that is accessible to all Singaporeans, offering an aesthetic framework in which the ongoing process of negotiating between Singapore’s national self and other unfolds.

Geographies of emotional and care labour

Recent years have witnessed shifts in the social organisation of emotional and care labour, especially as they intersect with new global trends in migratory patterns and international mobility, the restructuring of social reproduction and public—private divides, as well as the flexibilization of labour markets and a resurgence of unpaid labour such as volunteer work. With a focus on emotions and affect as a central epistemological and methodological orientation, this essay aims to draw connections between three distinct but related bodies of feminist scholarship: social reproduction theory, studies of emotional labour, and emotional geographies. The paper frames these approaches relative to the project of understanding the spatial dimensions of forms of emotional and care labour in neoliberal times.