Ang, Ann Su Lee

This article outlines the development of the Singapore Poetry Writing Month (SingPoWriMo) digital community, organised around an annual month-long poem-a-day, prompt-based writing challenge carried out on Facebook. As a highly active digital writing community, SingPoWriMo has generated more poetry in English in its six-year history than the Singapore literary community has since independence. The poems posted on SingPoWriMo are able to reach the group’s population of more than 7,000 members without the traditional filters to publication such as editorial input, publisher selection, economic choice and transaction, and critical review. Conversely, social media provides selective replacements for some of these functions, via comment threads, ‘likes’ and other reactions, as well as Facebook’s viral sharing function that allows poetry to reach an audience beyond the group. These factors of mass reach, rapidity, immediacy, and instant feedback have implications for the poetry generated, which goes on to integrate and remake traditional modes of publication and performance according to the qualities of a digital community. This article seeks to examine the historical antecedents and influences of high-volume, high-speed poetic output; the nature of the poetry being written in these digital writing communities; and the effects and implications of the SingPoWriMo phenomenon on the Singaporean and regional literary ecosystems. SingPoWriMo and its counterparts are new ways of writing that also create, and demand, new ways of understanding writing.

This chapter surveys a range of Anglophone writing about the Singapore cityscape from 1965 and contestations over its geo-cultural terrain.

Since their first publication in magazines like Graphic and the Philippine Free Press, and their subsequent re-publication under the collection title “Tropical Gothic,” Nick Joaquin’s classic short stories from the 1940s have been appraised mainly within a gothic framework. While critics have read the doublings and monstrous excesses of these stories as expressing a postcolonial resistance to colonial modernity, or a desirous anxiety for a pre-colonial Philippines, this paper discusses tropicality as a further localisation of such gothic elements. By adopting a new materialist approach to ecological imaginaries, this article argues that the discourse of the tropical in Joaquin’s aesthetics exercises an agentic role in re-locating temperate climactic markers within the Philippines. After briefly tracing the broader intellectual history of the tropical and the gothic, the discussion turns to the tropical gothic as a distinct category for the refiguration of gothic tropes within a material and tropical aesthetics. By drawing on feminism materialisms, this article makes a case for understanding tropical heat in “The Summer Solstice” and “The Dying Wanton,” as a source of animation and motility. Further attention to transcorporeality in these stories reveals the transformative power of the tropical on human bodies in their more-than-human aspects. By departing from sociohistorical frameworks, this paper invites further consideration of Joaquin’s contribution to a Philippine materialist and environmental poetics.

Amidst the expanding study of Commonwealth writing in the 1970s, local anglophone writers in Singapore encountered an unexpected wave of resistance from state and public discourses. Taking as its starting point a parliamentary speech that labelled anglophone poets as “the arty-crafty dodgers of reality,” this essay explores the precursors and further responses to Devan Nair’s speech in the university journal Commentary. Reading associated texts written by the participants in these forums, I argue that the local anglophone writer was caught between cultural decolonization and the developmentalist role of standard English alongside the English literary canon. Variously labelled as immoral, contrarian and uncommitted to the nation, the Singapore writer in English was subject to a curious brand of localized anglophone illegibility in a multilingual context. Adding to current discussions on the global anglophone, my essay discusses anglolocalism by contrast and presents other sites outside of literary studies, such as creative writing and English language teaching, where the figure of the postcolonial anglophone writer was rehabilitated.

This article discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.

This article surveys two important early publishers of writing from Southeast Asia with a regional reach and presents a case for understanding transnational connections based on publishing and writerly networks. Founded by Leon Comber in 1966, the Heinemann Writing Asia series emerged amidst a decolonizing Southeast Asia, publishing authors from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Besides being an important publication outlet for local writers without access to metropolitan publishing houses, the series arguably provided a regional outlet for works that fall outside the political rhetoric of national consolidation, while canonizing others from established literary traditions. The second half of the paper examines Skoob Pacifica, a London-based publishing imprint active between 1992 and 1994, paying specific attention to the two anthologies titled S. E. Asia Writes Back! and The Pen is Mightier than the Sword. The press was the first to position Southeast Asian writers and the region in opposition to the imperial metropole, in line with the rise of postcolonial studies in the Anglo-American academy. Significantly, Skoob Pacifica mirrors the earlier linguistic and geographical formation of the Heinemann series as a reflection of colonial linguistic legacies. By examining the affordances and limitations of Anglophone Southeast Asia through a materialist lens in the broader context of post independence and the Cold War, this essay makes a methodological case for understanding the region as a literary unit through its publishing networks.

Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day (2008) traces the Rajasekharans’ family history over three generations and re-memorializes the racial riots of May 13, 1969 from a Malaysian Indian perspective. Compared to an earlier phase of memorialization in Malaysia’s national discourse about racial and cultural identity, the novel engages in the process of re-memorialization from a transnational locus, that brings together the material contexts of the Anglo American publishing industry as well as Samarasan’s racialized belonging to her homeland as a mobile Malaysian. This doubly transnational frame is defined by a strong sense of injustice from a revisionist perspective, one that obscures the complex history behind Malaysia’s public discourse on race and reproduces the essentialism of racial categories. The novel’s regressive temporality is also a critique of Malaysia’s non-progression on issues of race, as much as it forecloses other ways of rethinking racialization in Malaysia.

This research article discusses developments in contemporary Anglophone Singapore poetry where a proliferation of writers' groups and literary initiatives has led to efforts to define a localized Anglophone poetic tradition. Focusing on the debut collections of two young poets, Joshua Ip and Hamid Roslan, we argue that the presence of Singlish in their work functions as a site of hermeneutical openness that challenges a neocolonial articulation of Singaporean cultural formations centered on ideologies of standardized English usage, which have homogenized ethnic identities and supported a narrative of national progress. This article theorizes the heteroglossic potentialities of the intersubjective lifeworld found in Ip's and Hamid's poetics by discussing how they eschew any naturalized relationship between language as a semiotic system and sociohistorical being, in favor of a renewed query into Anglophone writing as an accumulation of asymmetrical and uneasy cultural relations.