Global City Futures: Desire and Development in Singapore. Oswin, Natalie. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA, USA, 2019, pp. xiv + 144. ISBN 978-0-820-35502-3 (pbk).

Global City Futures tells a story about risk and its management at the heart of a postcolonial fantasy of development in Singapore. In this, the book makes two compelling contributions. It posits queerness as a category that exceeds LGBTQ subjectivities. It argues that ‘queer’ marks a location of trouble for the heteronormative home at the heart of national fantasies of security: it is a place of excess where not only same-sex desiring or trans persons, but also divorced, single and otherwise sexually dissident subjects dwell. In making this argument, the book also provincializes the moment of Singapore's independence from British rule in its analysis of the legal scaffolding that upholds the family norm in this city-state. Focusing on a colonial elite as the reproducers of Singaporean modernity, the book shows that what is at stake is the capacity of some subjects to be in step with the time both of the nation-state and that of global capital.

Building from these arguments, my comment interrogates the entanglement of time, capital and sexuality in the construction of home as a site where territorial security is materialized. In doing so, I draw on Geeta Patel (2006) to posit a fourth category, that of insurance, through which to ask two questions of the book. First, what is it that the fantasy of security at the heart of Singapore's investment in the family—both financial and moral—is trying to keep at bay? Second, in what ways are failures to achieve this norm financialized in the state's articulation of social security through capital?

Oswin draws on rich historical research to make the point that sexual subjectivity in Singapore is very much the story of colonial political economy and its transformation in the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the book shows, colonial records often emphasized the ‘peculiarity’ and ‘abnormality’ of Singapore as a community mostly of migrant men. Indigenous Malay men were, in this discourse, dismissed as uninterested in wage labour: located outside its calculus of capital, and in postcolonial Singapore iterated as ‘backward’, and needing education in creating appropriately modern families. The intimate economy of this ‘peculiarity’ was initially managed through the regulated supply of prostitute labour. Singapore, that is, was an extractive outpost, not a site where any kind of futurity compatible with the life of global capital could be imagined or produced. The migrant men whose labour enabled this extraction were not at ‘home’ in Singapore, but only temporarily housed in a place from which it was imagined they would always return elsewhere.

From the late nineteenth century, the book tells us, this began to change, marking a shift from ‘a narrow emphasis on production alone and toward an approach that understood production as linked to social reproduction’ (p. 69): a change that brought into focus the child at the heart of Singaporean futurity. Children have long had a place in postcolonial and queer theory as problematic figures. In investing in the child, the colonial government in Singapore consolidated the presence of the nuclear family at the heart of the emergent nation-state in the early twentieth century. The education of children and the health of mothers came to feature prominently in state policy. Prostitution and homosexuality—among other ‘excessive’ sexualities—came, in this process, to be criminalized and located at the margins of this new futurity-bearing Singaporean home, which became the social heart of a new productive economy of settled workers. Simultaneously a racialized ‘body project’ (p. 74) undergirded Straits Chinese self-making as modern, rational and socially respectable against an Oriental imaginary of China ‘mired in the world of opium, prostitutes and criminal violence’ (Yao Souchou, 1999, cited at p. 73). Through legislation on marriage and reform projects, Chinese women were made integral to the imaginary of the Singaporean home as a modern site where a national community would be fostered. The project of investing Singapore with futurity within the story of imperial capital was only made possible through this project of intimate governmentality.

Speaking from the calculus of insurance, the book shows that particular kinds of life were invested with value—tied to a territorial imaginary of the city-state and its progress. Coming to Singapore and buying into life in this city-state—made literal in the 1960s by the tying of the capacity to buy Housing Development Board homes to membership of a defined nuclear family form. This emphasis consolidated the marking as ‘abnormal’ of unmarried migrant men, as well as of family forms outside the nuclear family norm. Time, in this book, threads capital and intimacy together: bringing pasts to bear on futures and opening up spaces of incommensurability that lie in precarious relationship with discourses about national and global capital futurity. An argument about waste at the margins of this story of investment (Katz, 2018) haunts the book's reading of queering as a process of rendering marginal forms of intimacy that do not fit into this narrative of capital and progress.

The financialization of ‘waste’ as a form of insurance is suggested in the work of Sarah Lochlann Jain (2013) who sees insurance as a site where the body and its prognoses are drawn into the calculus of capital. Insurance suggests itself to Oswin's book in her rendering of security into Singapore's entanglement of capital and sexuality: as Oswin notes, ‘domestic’ is a word that speaks both to ‘home’ and to national security. In particular, I am curious to know what forms of insurance draw people into imagining failures to this domestic fantasy, and how does the state engage people in care of the self that is pre-emptory and invested in managing potential failures to this domestic fantasy. This, to me, would be significant to understanding the play of limit and permissiveness that seems to characterize this fantasy, and which the book usefully spells out. Or for that matter, do stories circulate of the kinds of threats that unsettle this fantasy of the Singaporean family, and how they might be managed? If so, how are they drawn into the deployment of capital?