New Citizenship and the Global-Local Interface: A Metapragmatic Approach to Citizenship Narratives in Singapore

This paper participates in the ongoing debates on language and citizenship by examining the perspective of new citizens in the discursive construction of citizenship using a metapragmatic approach. The data come from an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Singapore in 2015-2016. I argue that my participants’ accounts of affect and lived experiences about their encounters with the notion of citizenship in their everyday lives reveal how new citizens can negotiate the global-local interface that undergirds dominant discourses on Singapore (new) citizenship. I show how my participants used the signs of family and passports—both within the semiotic range of citizenship—to present themselves as new citizens who contest the global-local interface but still adhere to the expectations of the Singaporean state and society.