Poon, Angelia

"This project was an investigation into the ways in which the curricular coherence in the literature classrooms of two upper secondary literature teachers at average-ability schools in Singapore could be enhanced. Curricular coherence refers to the ways in which elements of curriculum, texts, different writers, themes, individual lessons, and classroom activities are related to each other (Applebee, 1996; Applebee, Burroughs, & Stevens, 2000)."-- [p. 1]

This article discusses the ambitious educational reforms of the Singapore government in response to the challenges of globalization vis-à-vis the specific issues arising from the case of teaching Literature in secondary schools. It shows how the Singapore state is invested in a particular view of globalization and argues how recent scholarly moves to recuperate the notion of cosmopolitanism may provide an alternative view. Turning to cosmopolitanism as an intellectual and ethical goal when considering curricular changes to Literature may also help revitalize the subject and garner a more significant role for it in the scripting of Singapore as a nation and global city for the future.

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.

THE POWER THAT COMES FROM being English in the Victorian period is crucially dependent on a categorizing imperative that establishes and structures a series of distinctions such as those between citizen and foreigner, colonizer and colonized, and metropole and colony. These distinctions have epistemological borders that require policing, as do all cross-border interactions that threaten to muddy the imperial landscape with unsanctioned forms of knowledge and affiliation. It is against such a framework of constraints for understanding the regulation of Englishness that the story of the Jamaican-bornMary Seacole and her self-styled role as “Mother” Seacole to British soldiers during the CrimeanWar appears particularly pregnant with bothersome possibilities. Seeking self-consciously to identify herself with the “mother” country and the imperial metropole, she constantly tests the waters of reception by English society in the mid-nineteenth century. Seacole deploys the image of her racially different body in various noticeably frontier places, mainly Panama and the Crimea, to induce a recognition of herself, if not as English, then as at least functionally so. In so doing, she disrupts the claim to cultural or national identity that is frequently grounded in racial and geographical specificity. She puts strain on the idea of Englishness as foreclosed essence, demonstrating through performance and reiteration its irreducibly performative nature as discourse.

In this article, I examine the implications for literature pedagogy based on recent developments in postcolonial theory and globalization studies. I argue for a critical cosmopolitan pedagogy that would nourish the creation of alternative imaginaries and teach young people through literature to be more fully in the world. Two instances of how this might be effected are provided. The first centers on how literary pedagogy in globalized times cannot avoid dealing with texts translated into English from other languages. Using the global, multicultural city of Singapore as a case in point, I show how teaching translated texts can be a strategic way of interrogating the hegemony of the Anglophone segment of the population, and historically, the English-educated class in Singapore, by providing minority perspectives erased by official history. A different past is thus used to question a normalized present. The second instance of a critical cosmopolitan pedagogy is discussed in relation to Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which deals with the pressing global issue of terrorism. It focuses on how the teacher can further help the text in its work to render the reader, rather than the object of narration, strange. Ultimately, a literature pedagogy that takes the question of perspective seriously can help us resist neoliberal capitalism’s emphasis on the management and care of the self in the service of markets in favor of a more politicized global subject fully committed to engaging the world.