Description
This paper centres on understanding racial discourses of migration through Charles Mills’ racial contract, locating it within a non-Anglophone context. Knowledge is transformable, contextual and culturally specific, therefore indicating that knowledges of race and otherness must exist beyond the boundaries of European notions of race. When we refer to ‘whiteness’ within race and migration scholarship, particularly in ‘nonwhite’ host countries, is there a risk of using it as a placeholder for something else; is it perhaps imprecise, borrowed and insufficient? With these questions, I interrogate what ‘nonwhiteness’ means in the context of Singapore, how race is understood among ‘nonwhites,’ and the equivalences and distinctions among them/us. In so doing, this paper examines the knowledge-production of nonwhiteness beyond the ‘west,’ and within that, what values, terms and conditions constitute the racial contract(s), and how it affects the racialised experiences of migrants.
