From home to nation: uncanny repression and the making of the haunted insider in Hwee Hwee Tan’s Foreign Bodies

Abstract

Drawing on Freud’s concept of the uncanny, this article examines how Singapore’s celebrated “safe city” imaginary obscures the emotional, legal, and cultural structures that complicate Chinese Singaporean subjectivity from within. Through a close reading of Hwee Hwee Tan’s Foreign Bodies, the analysis develops the concept of the “haunted insider” to describe subjects who appear securely embedded in the nation yet are continuously destabilized by intimate and institutional forms of repression. The analysis moves from the haunted family, where violence, neglect, and conflicts transform home into an uncanny space, to the legal field, where misrecognized “foreign bodies” reveal a pattern of displacing fault on others, and finally to Singapore’s national and urban imaginary, where the rhetoric of safety, efficiency, and Asian values depends on repressing these ghosts. The uncanny’s dynamics clarify how these silences and displacements circulate across domestic, legal, and national domains. In tracing this trajectory, the article shows how Foreign Bodies unsettles celebratory narratives of “safe Singapore” by foregrounding the haunted insider at their core and demonstrates the value of uncanny affects as a critical lens for diagnosing structural contradictions that shape individual subjectivity and institutional violence in contemporary Asia.