Between Two Singapores: Settler Romances, (Un)critical AI Fabulations, and the Unanswerable Why

• In Event: Unsettling Settler Romances

Abstract

On Michigan’s western coast, the town of Singapore lies buried beneath the dunes. Dubbed “Michigan’s Imaginary Pompeii” (Starring 1953; Starring 1954; Grant and Babcock forthcoming [2025]), the town is real, though romance stories told about it quickly run up against the silences that structure its material archive (Trouillot 1995). For residents of the nearby towns, Singapore is the “story everyone knows” (Howard 2025). Residents regularly tell each other—and willing visitors—stories about the foibles of the town’s early residents, especially the fraud-backed wildcat Bank of Singapore and the failed effort to build up the timbering town to rival Chicago as the premier metropolis on the Great Lakes (Cronon 1991). Ironically, the old growth white pine forests surrounding the town that were felled to rebuild Chicago following the Great Fire of 1871 released the sands that lay beneath, engulfing Chicago’s aspiring rival. Today, its ghostliness is a present absence (Bell 1997; DeLyser 1999; Timothy 2024) whose felt emptiness is not the limit of signification, but the engine that proliferates narratives of love, desire, and white, settler-colonial possessive attachments to the land transmogrified into property (Harris 1993; Grant and Babcock forthcoming [2025]). In Southeast Asia, Singaporeans are telling stories about Singapore, Michigan, too. Dozens of my interlocutors brought up the Michigan ghost town during my fieldwork research from 2018–20, and Singaporean news outlets periodically published human-interest pieces about it. None other than the Prime Minister of Singapore gave a speech in August 2024 that used the town of Singapore, Michigan, as an allegory for climate resilience and a fantasy of the paradoxical ability of the island city-state’s government to guarantee its own existence in perpetuity (Richland 2010).


At the heart of the proliferation of romance narratives about Singapore, Michigan voiced across Southeast Asian and Western Michigan geographies, there lies a question that is not just unanswered, but unanswerable: why? Why was the town named Singapore? The material archive provides no answer to the question that, for narrators across hemispheres, is often the first to arise. And yet, this has not stopped commentators from engaging in acts of geographic storytelling (McKittrick 2006) that attempt to fill the silences that structure the telling of the past. Since 2024, LLM technologies and their linked AI chatbots have been newly recruited into these geographic storytelling processes. This paper focuses on how AI technologies are being recruited as interlocutors capable of providing sure answers. By dropping the chatbot’s conditionals—the “perhaps,” “could be,” or “is possible that”—what results is not an actual answer to the question but an uncritical fabulation: not storytelling and speculation to fill the omissions of white supremacist history (Hartman 2008), but ways of knowing that uphold a romanticized settler status quo. I draw on scholarship in Black feminist historiography and geography (McKittrick 2006; Hartman 2008); Indigenous perspectives on space, place, and land (Tuck and McKenzie 2015); and theorizations of Global Asias (Chen 2021; Naruse 2023) to critically interrogate the narrative technologies that uphold settler romances amid the ruins of late-stage American empire globally.

Author

• Joshua Babcock, Brown University