Poon, Angelia

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.

Since the nation-state sprang into being in 1965, Singapore literature in English has blossomed energetically, and yet there have been few books focusing on contextualizing and analyzing Singapore literature despite the increasing international attention garnered by Singaporean writers. This volume brings Anglophone Singapore literature to a wider global audience for the first time, embedding it more closely within literary developments worldwide. Drawing upon postcolonial studies, Singapore studies, and critical discussions in transnationalism and globalization, essays unearth and introduce neglected writers, cast new light on established writers, and examine texts in relation to their specific Singaporean local-historical contexts while also engaging with contemporary issues in Singapore society. Singaporean writers are producing work informed by debates and trends in queer studies, feminism, multiculturalism and social justice -- work which urgently calls for scholarly engagement. This groundbreaking collection of essays aims to set new directions for further scholarship in this exciting and various body of writing from a place that, despite being just a small ‘red dot’ on the global map, has much to say to scholars and students worldwide interested in issues of nationalism, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism, immigration, urban space, as well as literary form and content. This book brings Singapore literature and literary criticism into greater global legibility and charts pathways for future developments.

"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]

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.

This chapter taps into the deep seam of literary dissent to trace and examines specifically the thematic of failed masculinity in three Singapore novels beginning with what is commonly regarded as the nation's first novel in English, If We Dream Too Long, by Goh Poh Seng. In an interesting continuation in subsequent decades, it is noteworthy that both the novels Abraham's Promise by Philip Jeyaretnam and City of Small Blessings by Simon Tay also center on the idea of failed men. The chapter focuses on Catherine Lim's satirical novel, Miss Seetoh in the World, which presents an interesting inflection of the problematic. In examining these Singapore novels through the optic of masculinity, the chapter draws upon both a tradition of feminist postcolonial scholarship about the gendering of nation and critical developments in gender and sexuality studies which have sought to make masculinity analytically visible as a gender rather than neutral, universal norm around which all else is organized and understood.