“You don’t look Singaporean, you what race ah?” State containment, cultural citizenship and ‘Pakistani’ identity in Singapore

This qualitative study examines how four generations of Singapore citizens classified as ‘Pakistani’ negotiate identity and belonging within a state-managed racial order. Drawing on in-depth interviews and family narratives, it brings Avtar Brah’s diaspora space into conversation with Aihwa Ong’s work on cultural citizenship and governmentality, Couldry’s formulation of recognition, and Mac an Ghaill and Haywood’s analysis of simultaneity and state containment. Singapore’s CMIO framework does more than describe difference. By making ‘Pakistani’ an administratively usable category, it compresses nationality, ethnicity, religion, ancestry and cultural affiliation into a single designation, even for families settled in Malaya before Pakistan existed. The analysis develops two connected themes – state containment of identity, and the uneven cultural recognition through which Muslim and Singaporean belonging is lived. It shows why legal citizenship cannot be assumed to settle cultural belonging, and extends debates on diaspora, racial governance and cultural citizenship beyond their British and Euro-American settings.