Poon, Angelia

This article argues for the importance and relevance of postcolonial studies in achieving the goal of cosmopolitanism through Literature education. Having significantly redrawn the overall contours of literary study in the twentieth century, postcolonial studies as an interdisciplinary critical tradition provides us with a conceptual vocabulary, analytical lens and interpretive protocols with which to interrogate rigorously many salient aspects of contemporary globalization in our world today. There are at least three main areas where postcolonialism’s contribution remains vital: i) in critical discussion about the nation and nationalism, ii) in countering Eurocentrism, and iii) in the examination of form, style and literary poetics or aesthetics. In this article, I explore each of these areas first before suggesting ways in which Anglophone Singapore literature may be taught and read through these critical emphases, with the ultimate goal of answering nation-centred goals while also fulfiling the national curriculum’s desired outcome of growing empathetic and global thinkers.

Tash Aw’s 2019 novel We, the Survivors narrates the story of a convicted killer, Ah Hock, whose life serves as a lens to refract contemporary Malaysia’s postcolonial history and its ethnic and class politics, as well as its location within the circuitry of global capitalism. This article examines Aw’s representation of migrancy, class, and inequality in contemporary Malaysian society, reading the text as a critique of global capitalism through its tactical employment of a universalist idiom that appropriates Darwinian ideas about survival, evolution, chance, environment, and competition. The text also reflects on the ethics of novel-writing since Ah Hock’s oral testimony is ostensibly mediated by a more privileged character. Aw locates his novel in the pivotal space between national specificity and general universalism while asking critical questions of his own position within the transnational literary marketplace, thereby underscoring the urgent need to re-world the world created by global capitalism.

In his third novel, Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw presents an account of globalization that ostensibly proclaims China's accelerating economic might and wealth in the new millennium with Shanghai as the global city par excellence as he traces the lives of five Malaysian Chinese characters seeking success there. Using metafictional strategies and a satirical play on the self-help genre however, Aw interrogates the possibility of re-invention as a fundamental implication of globalization. He undermines the idea of re-authoring one's identity by emphasizing instead the impossibility of total control due to the contingent nature of reading and the precarity of meaning. In this way too, Five Star Billionaire disrupts linearity and future-oriented subjectivities in favor of other temporalities that serve to counter the world of neoliberal globalization it deliberately invokes.

Writers of historical fiction invariably engage in acts of translation in order to make the past meaningful to present-day readers. Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence depicts the lives of two Chinese prostitutes in turn-of-the-century colonial Singapore while Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain traces the relationship between Philip Hutton, a young British-Chinese man, and a mysterious Japanese spy during the Second World War in Penang. Both novelists use metafictional elements to dislodge if not fracture the realist narrative frame and seek self-consciously to foreground the competing tensions at work in representing the past in these two Southeast Asian countries. They contest the historical arrangements of race, gender, and sexuality which continue into the present, and force the reader to confront the limits of historical knowledge and knowability. At the same time, through their depiction of queer desire and sexuality as well as their disruption of linear time in these novels, Kwa and Tan present their protagonists as being out of place and out of time. In so doing, they mount a crucial critique of the way in which national histories in postcolonial Singapore and Malaysia are invariably presented as “straight” narratives.