Global City Dilemmas and Anglophone Singapore Literature

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