A ghost town called Singapore: The politics of geographic storytelling, from the “wild heart of Saugatuck” to “Singapore Dunes, LLC”

For over 180 years, Singapore, a town buried under the sands on Lake Michigan’s shore, has sparked imagination—and controversy. Names and naming are integral to the conflict, revealing competing investments in the site as space, place, property, and land. In this piece, we mobilize Indigenous, Black feminist, and anthropological perspectives to track how competing categorizations of the former town deploy names and naming as centerpieces in acts of geographic storytelling that construct narratives both about and beyond the constructed bounds of a Western Michigan community.