BIFURCATED DOMESTICITY : IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS WITHIN THE DIASPORIC SOJOURN OF A BANGLADESHI MIGRANT WORKER IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

As Singapore develops into a more globalised city, it has increasingly been opening up to mobilities as the country continues to depend on external resources to satisfy its needs. The increasing migrant population has challenged the Government to manage the country’s population within its capacity and has tested the readiness of its society to assimilate a migrant population. As such, interactions with the migrants have caused the local community to be confronted with social and spatial practices that is considered outside of the ‘cultural’ norms in Singapore. Therefore, it is important to understand such societal and cultural differences through the understanding of the migrant workers’ identities. Treated more like commoditiesand seen in terms of numbers that come and go, this paper aims to understand the identity negotiations and the (re)configuration of their social identities that these migrant workers make during their ‘transit’ in Singapore via the spatial studies and material culture of the Bangladeshi migrant workers. Have their roles as brothers, sons, father or husband been suspended while they are away or do they continue to fulfil these roles and duties transnationally? This paper provides a fresh humanistic perspective to the Bangladeshi migrant workers’ identities in a diaspora space instead of the local community’s tendency to frame them as a migrant other with a faceless identity by introducing the theory (author’s) of a “Bifurcated Domesticity” ; due to these negotiations and (re)configurations of the migrant workers identities in the ‘host’ society as they constantly try to connect and disconnect with home, physically or psychologically, in order to maintain a home transnationally they serve dual spaces; one in their homeland in which they are physically absent and the other in their ‘hostland’ where they are physically present.