Cut and dried: re-claiming land in Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACT After seventy years of concerted expansion, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of the sea, this artificial land aspires to cut to the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). From what vantage point can one capture that sovereign gesture, whose structure is that of recursion? To venture an answer, I first proceed by asking: what exactly is being ‘reclaimed’ here in reclamation? Why should the creation of ‘new’ land need to be enacted in the idiom of a ‘re’? Though reclamation purports to create land ‘from sea’, key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand – a material substance which Singapore imports in such vast quantities that some have called it a ‘de facto transfer of territory’. Despite this, however, I argue that reclamation cannot simply be dismissed as a misnomer or as cynical rhetoric. Reclamation’s ‘re’ discloses rather than obscures the temporal workings of sovereign state power. Drawing on the legal history and ethnographic present of reclamation in Singapore, I explore how this implied recursiveness clues us into an essential temporal structure that animates the territorial state, with repercussions for the way we formulate our political critiques.