Vincent Song

'Consuming' the Peranakan Identity: Understanding Postcoloniality and Consumption
Supervisors: Professor Peter Jackson and Dr Tariq Jazeel

Brief

Note: The Peranakans are of combined Chinese and Malay ancestry that leads back to the pre-colonial period in Straits Southeast Asia

The main objective of this research project is to uncover the geographies of consumption (Thrift and Jackson, 1995; and Goss, 2006) surrounding the idea of the Peranakan culture in Singapore and Malaysia. Geographers have repeatedly been calling for a convergence between 'the economic' and 'the cultural' paying closer attention to material cultures with questions of meaning and representations.

This research thus seeks to uncover the variations in consuming ethno-cultural commodities (such as clothing and food) of the Peranakans within different geographical and historical contexts, and in so doing, disrupt notions of 'the cultural' as natural. My research also attempts to explore a post-colonial material culture within a non-Western context. In this light, I hope to engage a historico-geographical lens in exploring the multiple ways in which construction of ethno-cultural differences in Singapore (during the colonial period) are related to the nation's post-independence state-multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

Past Research

Geopolitical Fears of Banal Terrorism Brief
This research explores the geopolitical fears surrounding the 'War on Terror' and examines how discourses of terrorism translate into the everyday experiences of individuals in public urban spaces. In so doing, this research seeks to show that fears and anxieties are culturally inflected and place specific, theorizing a different view from most of geopolitical literature that sees anxious urbanism as a universal experience. Attention needs to be paid to the sensitivities to which these anxieties are historical produced and culturally inflected. This research is based on fieldwork in Singapore in which individuals' reactions and experiences of sites and sights of terror are examined. In doing so, the paper also engages with local and regional specificities, which may be obscured by the use of the term anxious urbanism.

Research interests

• Social and cultural Geography
• Postcolonialism
• Notions of Race, Ethnicity, Cosmopolitanism and Multiculturalism
• Material Cultures

Education

PhD (current):
Human Geography – University of Sheffield

Bachelor of Social Sciences (First Class Honours):
Geography – National University of Singapore

Awards

2009 – 2012: University of Sheffield Fee Waivers
2006 – 2009: National University of Singapore Scholarships

Contact Details

Address: Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK
Email: ggp09vjs@sheffield.ac.uk and vsong.jl@gmail.com