When there are no pagodas on Pagoda Street: language, mapping and navigating ambiguities in colonial Singapore

摘要

What does it mean to constitute the landscape in language? The author addresses the complications of navigating a colonial landscape such as 19th-century Singapore, and the complex web of mobilities emerging from multiple knowledges. Despite the existence of official streetnames, different racial groups possessed different names and references for the very same streets—even within the same language. How then can we ever know of a place if it is inscribed by the interplay of cultural and linguistic experiences that constitute specific worlds? Drawing from Wittgenstein and Derrida, the author attempts to engage with the linguistic assumptions governing mobility in the multilayered colonial space of Singapore in which the same street is always a different street—and experienced very differently.