Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment

Part I: Sanitizing the Private Environment

P A R T I Sanitizing the Private Environment AN emerging theme in current research into the health conditions of colonial societies has been the concern not so much with disease and medicine as purely epidemiological or medical phenomena, but with their instrumentality: that is, with their role in 'describing a relationship of power and authority between rulers and the ruled and between colonialism 's constituent parts'. 1 It has been argued that the history of 'tropical medicine' and 'sanitary science' did not pursue an independent , progressive trajectory divorced from the economic, social, and political ambitions of colonialism, but instead posed as another form of domination.2 The colonial medical and sanitary campaign not only served to legitimize imperial rule and to impart to it a gloss of munificence, an 'illusion of permanence',3 but was in itself an 'exercise of disciplinary power'4 which penetrated into the smallest details of everyday life. Its potency was reflected in the variety of metaphors used to describe colonial medicine: it was one of the 'tools of empire' that facilitated Western penetration,S a 'military campaign'6 and a 'key weapon' in the subjugation of indigenous culture and the promotion of European allegiance.7 Recently, studies of colonial medicine and sanitation have focused on the capacity of colonial power, through its complex of institutional and legislative machinery, to order, regulate, and sanitize the subordinated society. For example, Swanson traces the creation of urban apartheid in South Africa to the 'sanitation syndrome ', and its associated societal metaphors of infection and disease,8 whilst Thomas argues that in colonial Fiji, the extension of state power and its various political, moral, and cultural impositions were justified by their association or conflation with the programme of sanitation.9 While it is often acknowledged that the relationship of power inherent in colonial medical and sanitary projects was neither static nor uncontested, much less has been written about the attitudes and responses of the colonized body to these impositions of power. 'What we still need to discover', according to one commentator, 'is how Southeast Asians [and other colonized peoples] perceived the effects of imperial medicine, how they weighed its bungling insensitivity against occasional triumphs.'10 There has been relatively little analysis of the specific strategies with which the colonized responded to co-operate Sanitizing the Private Environment AN emerging theme in current research into the health conditions of colonial societies has been the concern not so much with disease and medicine as purely epidemiological or medical phenomena, but with their instrumentality: that is, with their role in 'describing a relationship of power and authority between rulers and the ruled and between colonialism 's constituent parts'. 1 It has been argued that the history of 'tropical medicine' and 'sanitary science' did not pursue an independent , progressive trajectory divorced from the economic, social, and political ambitions of colonialism, but instead posed as another form of domination.2 The colonial medical and sanitary campaign not only served to legitimize imperial rule and to impart to it a gloss of munificence, an 'illusion of permanence',3 but was in itself an 'exercise of disciplinary power'4 which penetrated into the smallest details of everyday life. Its potency was reflected in the variety of metaphors used to describe colonial medicine: it was one of the 'tools of empire' that facilitated Western penetration,S a 'military campaign'6 and a 'key weapon' in the subjugation of indigenous culture and the promotion of European allegiance.7 Recently, studies of colonial medicine and sanitation have focused on the capacity of colonial power, through its complex of institutional and legislative machinery, to order, regulate, and sanitize the subordinated society. For example, Swanson traces the creation of urban apartheid in South Africa to the 'sanitation syndrome ', and its associated societal metaphors of infection and disease,8 whilst Thomas argues that in colonial Fiji, the extension of state power and its various political, moral, and cultural impositions were justified by their association or conflation with the programme of sanitation.9 While it is often acknowledged that the relationship of power inherent in colonial medical and sanitary projects was neither static nor uncontested, much less has been written about the attitudes and responses of the colonized body to these impositions of power. 'What we still need to discover', according to one commentator, 'is how Southeast Asians [and other colonized peoples] perceived the effects of imperial medicine, how they weighed...