Punjabi Delights in Forbidden City Singapore: The Space of Flows and Place (Research Notes) (Report‪)‬

Saskia Sassen (2006, p. 2), in her book Cities in a World Economy, complicates the conceptualization of the information economy by David Harvey (1990), Manuel Castells (2000), Arjun Appadurai (1996), and others through her reinscription of place into the undifferentiated space of globalization by recovering "material conditions, production sites, and place boundedness", arguing that global processes require places. In so arguing, she accords a new and strategic role to major cities in the production of locality to show that economic globalization is not only about massive dispersal of operations around the world but also about "thick places" (Sassen 2006, p. 3). Calling attention to cities as "strategic places in an emergent transnational political and cultural geography", she points out that the altered role of cities by economic globalization constitutes "new geographies" of "centrality" as well as "marginality" (Sassen 2006, p. 45). Viewing cities as strategic global sites, Sassen (2001) had proposed the notion of the global city to define certain major cities that play a lead role in the current phase of world economy. Among the forty global cities or megacities that she names in this book, Singapore features more than once. As both primate and megacity, (1) Singapore is unique in its being articulated to each of these dimensions of global processes that are located in very thick places of the old port city. Bhangra is now understood as a British Asian music produced by the hybridization of Punjabi dhol beats with western rhythms of pop, reggae, hip hop, and rap. But it is derived from a Punjabi dance genre of the same name performed largely by males on moonlit nights along Punjab's rivers in newly harvested fields. (2) The number and variety of Bhangra mutants--rustic, urban, traditional, hybrid, Bollywood--circulating across different Bhangra sites and neighbourhoods in the present makes it impossible to speak about a homogenous Bhangra "scene". (3) But Bhangra production and consumption across various continents intersects despite the divergence in the content, address and contexts of Bhangra texts. By examining the multiple places in Singapore in which new Bhangra mutants are performed, this research note argues that the digitized circuits of consumption and entertainment in the global city foreground a new global politics of place formed through transnational ethnic networks.