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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the affective domains of host-migrant relations in Singapore. I locate the roots of boundary-making practices and anti-migrant discourse in what Polanyi describes as the “deleterious effects” of economic liberalisation, using the emotive towards de-escalating polarisation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the affective domains of everyday host-migrant relations in Singapore. I focus on sensory contact zones between locals who live in public housing estates and low-wage foreign domestic workers (FDWs) who gather in public spaces adjacent to these estates. Drawing on participant sensation, interviews, and sensewalks with 12 public housing residents over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how perceived sensory infractions reveal fears about the erosion of Singaporean folkways and the devaluation of public housing assets while stoking anti-immigrant sentiments. Revisiting Polanyi’s concept of the countermovement and placing it in conversation with the notions of neoliberal morality and affective economy of removal, I develop the concept of provisional tolerance. This theoretical approach complicates the relationship between affect and removal in the lives of those in unfree labour regimes. Provisional tolerance thus captures how FDWs are rendered “out of place” when their bodies and sensescapes spill from sanctioned enclaves into residential spaces, yet begrudgingly acknowledged as necessary labour in the neoliberal-developmental state of Singapore. In light of diffuse political structures and economic systems that foster a laissez-faire approach to immigration, anger is thus displaced onto proximate migrant bodies, and protectionist approaches become more pronounced. In adopting a host-focused lens, I do not relativise migrant marginalisation in Singapore. Instead, I locate the roots of boundary-making practices and anti-migrant discourse in what Polanyi describes as the “deleterious effects” of economic liberalisation, and use the emotive to trace a pathway towards radically de-escalating polarisation.