Global City Dilemmas and Anglophone Singapore Literature
Intersectional Politics and Cultural Negotiations in the 21st Century
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Beschreibung
Angelia Poon is Associate Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
This book examines Anglophone Singapore literature in the new millennium as it complicates and disrupts the reductive trajectory of Third World to First that has come to characterize dominant impressions of Singapore as a developed, postcolonial nation. It shows how the state’s determined positioning of Singapore as a global city, which began in earnest in the 1990s, has led to social dilemmas and cultural fissures emerging from the intersection of colonial history, postcolonial legacies and neoliberal capitalism. It explores the ways in which literature constitutes a potent site for the critical examination and cultural negotiation of intersecting identity claims, interests, logics, histories and ideologies as Singapore writers grapple with key aspects of contemporary Singapore society including its official multiracialism, forms of inequality, distribution of privilege, history, coloniality, and gender and sexual politics. Often, the texts challenge hegemonic perspectives by resisting the monolithic and unitary in favor of the heterogeneity of experience, disclosing in a way unique to literature the importance and complexity of affect. The chapters in this book historicize and offer close analyses of some of Singapore’s most culturally significant contemporary writing in relation to salient theoretical and conceptual frames like decoloniality, minority politics, cosmopolitanism, flexible accumulation, and affect theory.
'An important synthesis of the critical approach of a leading scholar of Anglophone Singapore literature.'
--Philip Holden, co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English
'This sharp, lively book is essential reading for scholars of contemporary literature and culture. Combining rigorous cultural, political, and socioeconomic research with consideration of several important and compelling literary texts, it conveys the significance and range of contemporary Singaporean Postcolonial literature in English.'
--Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures, Nottingham Trent University and author of Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace and Global Literature and Gender
This book looks at culturally significant, English-language texts produced in Singapore in the last 20 years by writers such as Balli Kaur Jaswal, Alfian Sa’at, Claire Tham, Amanda Lee Koe, Ng Yi-Sheng and Kevin Kwan. It provides an analysis sensitive to the writers' socio-political and cultural contexts, and shows how Singapore's Anglophone literature successfully disrupts the government’s narrative on transforming the island into a global city. By asking difficult questions, challenging hegemonic perspectives and exploring alternatives, the writers interrogate the country’s colonial history, its post-colonial Cold War development, and the normalization of totalizing narratives. Their texts also grapple with key aspects of contemporary Singapore society: its official multiracialism, forms of inequality, distribution of privilege, and gender and sexual politics. By connecting these texts to developments in postcolonial literary criticism, cosmopolitanism and globalization studies, thisbook sheds light on the ideological and cultural forces at work in Singapore society today.
Focuses on Singapore writing produced in the last 20 years Draws on scholarship from different disciplines, including history, sociology and politics Provides a historicist analysis of Singapore literature in English that is sensitive to its cultural context
Autor*in
Angelia Poon
Themen in »Global City Dilemmas and Anglophone Singapore Literature«
Literature and Cultural Studies Literature and Postcolonial Studies Literature and Space Singapore Cosmopolitanism Intersectionality
Stimmen zu »Global City Dilemmas and Anglophone Singapore Literature«
“Global City Dilemmas consists of a series of chapters that first contextualize Singaporean literary texts from the first two decades of the new millennium both theoretically and historically, and then proceed to nuanced close readings. … Global City Dilemmas is one of a growing number of recent monographs reading Singapore literature and other, largely Anglophone, cultural texts through the lens of literary theory … . This is an important, timely and unique book.” (Philip Holden, South East Asia Research, January 23, 2025)
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