The semiotics of undesirable bodies: Transnationalism, race culture, abjection
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Robbie B. H. Goh
Robbie B. H. Goh (b. 1964) is a professor at the National University of Singapore 〈robbiegoh@nus.edu.sg〉. His research interests include Christianity in Asia, popular culture, and Asian diasporas. His publications include “Cyberasian: Science, hybridity, modernity, and the Asian body” (2010); “Christianity, transnationalism, and Indian identities: The problematic role of religion in Diasporas” (2011); and “The city and the economy of ‘losing’: Targetting competitive bodies in an era of global competition” (2012).
Abstract
Contemporary transnational migration has given rise to a new ideology and semiotics of the foreign body – one that draws on the cognitive field of the primitive, marked, and abjected body. This foreign body is carefully differentiated from both the sphere of the local/national, and the “expatriate” professional who by virtue of economic and cultural capital is desired and assimilated into the local sphere. An aspiring cosmopolitan and global city-state like Singapore shows this semiotic differentiation to quite a marked degree, in the policies and discourses of barely-tolerated and abjected foreign workers whose racially-marked bodies are highlighted by typologies of violence, disease, sexuality (particularly in aberrant or promiscuous form), and mob assemblies. The semiotics of the foreign body in Singapore is also evident in other racial-cultural fissures elsewhere, including in countries with multicultural reputations such as Australia, and countries like the U.S., U.K. and France that are struggling to cope with large migrant communities of Middle-Eastern and South Asian peoples.
About the author
Robbie B. H. Goh (b. 1964) is a professor at the National University of Singapore 〈robbiegoh@nus.edu.sg〉. His research interests include Christianity in Asia, popular culture, and Asian diasporas. His publications include “Cyberasian: Science, hybridity, modernity, and the Asian body” (2010); “Christianity, transnationalism, and Indian identities: The problematic role of religion in Diasporas” (2011); and “The city and the economy of ‘losing’: Targetting competitive bodies in an era of global competition” (2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- The semiotics of undesirable bodies: Transnationalism, race culture, abjection
- A socio-semiotic framework for the analysis of exhibits in a science museum
- Indefinite identity: The masked terrorist as iconic legisign
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A semiotic model of visual perception
- Art, science, and value as found in Peirce's ten trichotomies
- Reforming visual semiotics: The dynamic approach
- An early semiotic
- “Language as calculus” in Beckett's writing: A new perspective on Beckett's conception of language
- Media representations of science, andimplications for neuroscience and semiotics
- Ubiquitous but arbitrary iconicity
- Nation and globalization as social interaction: Interdiscursivity of discourse and semiosis in the 2008 Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony
- Documentary evidence as hegemonic reconstruction
- Semiotic resources of music notation: Towards a multimodal analysis of musical notation in student texts
- The semiotics of undesirable bodies: Transnationalism, race culture, abjection
- A socio-semiotic framework for the analysis of exhibits in a science museum
- Indefinite identity: The masked terrorist as iconic legisign
- The segmentation of phenomenological space in Licheń as an example of double binds
- Wine labels in Austrian food retail stores: A semiotic analysis of multimodal red wine labels
- Exploring the rhetorical semiotic brand image structure of ad films with multivariate mapping techniques
