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.