Housing and the City: Constructing Locality and Minority Subjectivities in Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Inheritance and Sugarbread

This chapter considers the significance of public housing and the housing estates commonly referred to as Singapore’s heartland (s), examining how they operate as an overdetermined site of ideological tension and affect for Singapore’s national and global city identities. For the state, the iconography of public housing helps naturalize certain ideologies about family, gender, multiracial community, and ‘home’, powerfully underwriting national identity and establishing normative behavior. Literary articulations of the heartland however bring to the fore alternative perspectives and diverse experiences which sometimes confirm but mostly query dominant notions about the desired national subject as well as ideal forms of sociality that I call ‘national living’. Using selected literary texts from the end of the 1990s and into the new millennium, I first examine how Singapore writers seek to represent the emotional texture of the ordinary spaces of daily living in public housing. Reflecting a commitment to the local through their aesthetic, these writers lay claim to a more ‘authentic’ national experience figured against both the state’s monopolistic control over the meaning of public housing spaces and its decisive steps to sculpt Singapore’s global city landscape. Next, I examine two novels by Balli Kaur Jaswal about Punjabi Sikh families in public housing to scrutinize the state’s disciplining and accommodation of its ethnic minority subjects. I argue that Jaswal’s retrospective and reflexive interrogation of historical nation-building and the norms that make up national living through her consideration of the struggles of minority subjectivities in a spatialized idiom speaks directly to the dilemma over inclusivity and conformity that lies at the nexus of national multiracialism and global city cosmopolitanism.