Destination Storytelling Singapore

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and the Constructed Global Audience

Abstract

This article examines deployments of the film Crazy Rich Asians (2018) framed and reframed as a case of Singapore’s destination storytelling ‘success’ in both ethnographic data and published media. We analyze the interinstitutional production of destination storytelling as a professional practice that draws on media development, place/destination branding, and tourism promotion as its conditions of possibility. We argue that the destination-storytelling success in the case of CRA is constructed as a function of the film’s recognition by ‘global’ audiences, a category framed as intersubstitutable with both Western and American. This global audience qua Western/American viewer is further constructed as eminently distractable, perpetually in need of new settings to consume, making Singapore’s destination storytelling success a potentially temporary, fragile achievement. This case emphasizes how local/global contrasts and acts of accommodation that purport to bridge them are not given in advance, but rather come into being via contextually situated, comparative scaling projects.