Philip Holden: Revised Abstract

The short story has been a significant genre in English and in other languages in Singapore, and as a significant genre it has been a place of many overlapping desires, with passageways connected to a variety of sites of memory. Mapping such connections necessitates a widening from close textual analysis informed by literary theory to a larger series of perspectives that draw on networks of as publishers, scenes of writing, and audiences. The short story is perhaps the most significant Singapore literary genre, but it has periods of dominance and recession. These periods of feast and famine, I think, should alert us to the fact that assembling a coherent literary history of the genre is impossible: its social function has changed, and continues to change, over time. Thinking seriously about the short story in Singapore as a site of memory may also encourage us to ask questions about how many of the assumptions behind scholarship in literary studies are being eroded by new communities of distribution, authorship, and readership.

My paper uses Carolyn Miller’s discussion of genre as social action to examine the short story in English at three moments of dominance in Singapore: its importance in comprador communities in the early twentieth century, its use as a means of subjectification for citizens by the developmental state in the 1970s and 1980s, and its sudden return to popularity in the last few years. Its renewed popularity, I argue, is very different from its role in establishing a national reading public thirty years ago. Short stories circulate within circuits of commodification and consumption through bookstores, social media sites, blogs, and online journals, at times exchanged virtually, at others crystallizing into print objects whose paratextual elements exceed in significance those of the stories themselves. Some stories, notably those in Amanda Lee Koe’s recent prize-winning collection Ministry of Moral Panic, mime these circuits in the experiences of reading they offer, confronting readers with troubling questions about our own intimate and quotidian implication in structures of power.

Yet a more common tendency of recent short stories is to turn their back on the global, or rather to rediscover the global and the cosmopolitan in sites of memory in a modern past which a previous generation of writers found oppressive, particularly in the “heartland” of the Housing & Development Board public housing estates that crowd the island. Such investment in the past, I argue, is not simply nostalgic. Rather, it enables the implicit re-imagining of a teleological narrative of progress. Paradise is in the past, not in the future. The social action that many such stories perform is to recast the narrative of the developmental state not in terms of Romance, but in terms of Tragedy. And postcolonial tragedy, as David Scott  and others have argued, is a powerful pedagogical mode: it asks us to pause, and reflect, and finally to think about a commitment to social justice as the shared potential heritage of all who have come to live in Singapore.

Weihsin Gui: Revised Abstract

This essay examines two seemingly disparate texts that share the same title: Wang Gungwu’s Pulse (1950), a series of lyric poems largely addressing the experience of individuals transitioning between rural and urban life and also the first collection of English-language poetry by a Malayan/Singaporean writer; Lydia Kwa’s Pulse (2010), a novel about a Singaporean-born acupuncturist living in Canada who returns to the country after a long absence to attend the funeral of her former female lover’s son. Separated by sixty years, the similarity between Wang’s poetry and Kwa’s prose is more than titular.

This essay poses the following questions regarding the connection between literature and cultural politics in Singapore: what if we understood fiction and poetry less in terms of a humanistic resistance towards or redemption of a coldly rational and pragmatic society, and more in terms of a set of tactics and techniques of caring for one’s self and other selves within a social system that determines what kinds of human subjectivities are appropriate, even legitimate, for an information age of global capital? In other words, if Singapore has achieved an accelerated modernity via the government’s relentless enframing of its human and natural resources through technocratic expertise, can we think of literature not just as an impassioned outcry against this state of affairs but also as a different manifestation of expertise in the sense of tekhne: the bringing forth or configuration of various political, social, and cultural forces through language as art?

The theoretical armature of this essay draws on Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault’s respective discussions of technology versus poetry and tekhne as a form of ethical poetics.

Heidegger, in “A Question Concerning Technology” (1954), distinguishes between (on the one hand) technology’s enframing or challenging-forth of human and natural resources into a standing-reserve to be expended and (on the other hand) poetry’s unfolding or bringing-forth of as yet unrevealed or inarticulated relations and forces between humans and nature that are foreclosed or disavowed through technological enframing. Both technology and poetry are different modes of tekhne rather than opposed modalities; therefore, the poiesis of literature can work immanently, within and through technology, without necessarily culminating in the latter’s enframing power. Hence Michel Foucault’s further elaboration of tekhne as embodied or materialized knowledge and the creative labor of writing one’s self (poiesis) as an ethical activity that is both social and relational rather than self-centered.

As Michael Barr points out in “Beyond Technocracy: The culture of elite governance in Lee Hsien Loong’s Singapore” (2005), the conventional understanding that the Singaporean state has a purely pragmatic and inhuman mindset is not entirely correct. The technocratic expertise of Singapore’s ruling elite is a combination of technical proficiency, problem-solving acumen, personal charisma, and inspirational leadership, manifested in certain key figures such as the current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. What if Singaporean fiction and poetry operated through similar means but to different ends? To directly resist the definition of literature as “a luxury we cannot afford” (to use Lee Kuan Yew’s famous phrase) might require adopting an overly defensive position in the contestation of cultural politics. On the other hand, treating literature as a technology we cannot avoid might help us apprehend how fiction and poetry have played and continue to play important roles as both tekhne and poiesis in Singapore’s cultural imaginary, whether at home or abroad.

The Panel As Planned

This session presents new scholarship on English-language narratives from Singapore. The city-state, recently ranked by The Economist as the costliest city in the world, is increasingly the site of cultural production that interrogates the intersection of social inequality, capital, and migrant labor. Notably ILO ILO (2013), a Singaporean film about a Filipina domestic worker’s life during the 1997 Asian financial crisis has recently received numerous international accolades and awards. Such cultural production emphasizes Singapore’s importance as a site for negotiating imbricated national, postcolonial, and global frameworks.

Our three speakers examine how human subjects and built environments are shaped and mapped through narratives of development and modernity that stretch back into the past and forward in the future, combining formal literary analysis with historical and geographical particularities. Our panel directly addresses the conference’s presidential topic “Negotiating Sites of Memory”: situated both within the neoliberal-global economy and a world literary field, Singapore is an exemplary locus where new discourses connecting literature, place, and memory — and their corresponding cultural, social, and material analyses — may be negotiated and forged.

Unlike other former British colonies where English-language writing flourished in the transition to national independence, Singaporean literature in English in its early post-independence years remained the province of a small elite. Literary production has become more prolific and literary scholarship more sophisticated in the 1990s as the country positioned itself as a key node in the global economy. While Shirley Lim’s Writing Southeast Asia (1994), Eddie Tay’s Colony, Nation, and Globalisation (2010), and Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden’s Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (2010) have contextualized Singaporean literature in a regional framework, the first historical anthology, Writing Singapore (2009) by Angelia Poon, Holden, and Lim, only appeared four decades after the nation-state’s independence in 1965. This suggests that literature and scholarship, cultural formation, and national identity in Singapore are not isomorphic and are unfolding in varying directions and at different speeds.

Although Singapore’s nationhood informs our panel, we are more engaged with emerging conversations linking literature to new cultural forms of self- and place-making in Singapore, such as Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Yeo Wei-Wei’s Postcolonial Urbanism (2003), Wee Wan-ling’s The Asian Modern (2010), and Jini Kim Watson’s The New Asian City (2011). Our speakers and respondent are from different institutions and at various academic ranks, and our focus on literature’s inscription and interrogation of memory, spatiality, and modernity connects with but also departs from a successful special session on culture and biopolitics in Singapore at MLA 2013.

Philip Holden examines the short story genre as a site of memory during two brief periods when it was the dominant literary genre in Singapore: the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century centuries, and the present. Short stories published in The Straits Chinese Magazine (1897-1907) and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (2001-present) respond to similar socio-political and economic concerns and the need to construct what Walter Mignolo calls “cosmopolitan localism” through fictional form and theme. More importantly, the short story as a genre harnesses new technologies of production and distribution to create reading publics. Such discussions, Holden argues, enable a practice of “proximate reading” that combines the cosmopolitan close reading of theorists like Pheng Cheah and the distant reading advocated by Franco Moretti, illuminating social potentialities through literary texts.

Weihsin Gui also connects the past to the present by analyzing two texts about Singapore with the same title: Wang Gungwu’s poems in Pulse (1950) move from colonial history towards national modernity; Lydia Kwa’s novel Pulse (2010) recounts how a Singaporean-born acupuncturist living in Canada returns to confront her romantic and familial past. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s discussion of technology and poetics as complementary rather than opposed modes of power-knowledge, Gui argues that both Wang’s and Kwa’s texts are poetic technologies that negotiate Singapore’s modernity by reconfiguring individual pasts and collective memories into a relational present through literary form. Instead of foregrounding a resistant politics against colonialism or state technocracy, Wang’s and Kwa’s writings emphasize the construction of modern subjects through what Michel Foucault calls an aesthetics of existence.

An aesthetics of topography is central to Joanne Leow’s argument that contemporary literary texts are loci of resistance against Singapore’s extensive history of urban planning. The most recent instance of this is the government’s 2013 Master Plan, a cartography of power which produces the city-state as a planned spectacle celebrating a pragmatic and teleological capitalist matrix. Evoking Henri Lefebvre’s theories of social space and spontaneous spatial practice, Leow interprets the flash fiction and textual fragments in Alfian Sa’at’s Malay Sketches (2013) and Tan Shzr Ee’s Lost Roads (2007) as counter-cartographies, as they seek to inhabit the intimate spaces of memory and the everyday. By critically deploying spatial theory, Leow’s close readings consider how these assemblages resist totalizing blueprints as they reclaim the affective, the indeterminate and the unquantifiable.

Approaching literature as generative genre, poetic technology, and counter-cartography, our speakers highlight the fact that, despite the city-state’s hypermodernity and developmental ideologies that stress the benefits of globalization, its literary texts enter the global literary marketplace and imagine a world literary space along alternative local routes. Due to the lack of established publishers and presses with worldwide distribution, most of the output from the recent explosion of literary activity in Singapore is published by small, independent publishing houses, or distributed through online journals or blogs targeting specific reading communities. The concept of a national literature must therefore be revised as more recent writers and their texts engage contrapuntally — or not at all — with an earlier generation of Singaporean authors and politicians who sought to define a coherent modern and national identity. While many formulations of world literature and global literary space emphasize transnational mobility and deterritorializing movement, literary praxis in Singapore foregrounds the importance of the sedentary and the local in shaping a wider sense of the worldly and the global, and the possibilities of negotiating the nation’s past, present, and future through a situated cosmopolitanism.