Jennifer Silver

Through twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore, this research sought to elucidate how migrant domestic and construction workers who write and perform poetry reinterpret development discourses that are conventionally applied to low-wage migrant worker populations in Singapore. The project aimed to understand how individual migrant workers, who support their families with remittances and are often encouraged by NGOs as well as sending and receiving governments to learn skills that can improve their earning potential upon returning home, have used creative writing to cultivate aspirational identities for themselves as poets, artists, and community leaders in Singapore. Further, it traced how the emergence and growth of a community of migrant writers has enabled its members to establish a durable presence in the Singapore literary scene, and thus expand common perceptions about the lasting contributions that low-wage migrant workers make to Singapore. Supported by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, this project entailed extensive participant observation with Singapore’s migrant writing community and the wider Singapore literary scene, in-depth interviews with individuals involved in migrant writing and arts communities, and textual analysis of creative writing by migrant workers published in English and Indonesian languages.