Singaporean Literature

Some years ago, a visiting writer came to the Singaporean university where I was a lecturer in Renaissance literature. Such visitors came and went frequently under the auspices of the creative writing program there, and, wrapped up in my own concerns, I usually paid them little attention beyond an occasional hello in the corridor. One day, however, this man's name caught my eye on the spine of a book in the Kino Kuniya bookshop on Orchard Road. I opened it and fell under its spell upon reading the first paragraph. It was a description of a trip to Calcutta, a city that he finds reassuringly unchanged on each return visit, whereas Singapore, his home, has changed beyond recognition during his lifetime. His account of finding the constant in his life in a place he doesn't belong to, and of belonging to a place he has fallen out with, spoke to my own contradictions as an emigrant. In describing Calcutta, he conjured a sense of intimacy with the exotic that I had once felt in Singapore, and that I wanted to recover, even if only in the pages of a travel book. I made a point of getting to know him after that. We had coffee one day outside the Singapore Art Museum. I told him how much I liked his book, and we talked about the corporatized university scene, and the transformation of the humanities into a battlefield in the culture wars. He was experiencing a version of these things in Australia, and I was a refugee from American academe, having spent six years of doctoral work at Duke University during the era of the infamous lacrosse rape case. It

We are pleased to present three of our donor collections in this issue-the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) Collection, the Jamshed & Parvati Fozdar Collection and the Lee Kim Long Collection. The SGX Collection is the largest single donation in terms of volume in recent years, comprising 13,000 print publications and 8,000 CD-Roms of annual reports and circulars. The Jamshed & Parvati Fozdar Collection is a compilation of the personal memoirs and chronicles of the Fozdar family. The late Mrs Shirin Fozdar founded the Singapore Council of Women's Organisations and was instrumental to the establishment of the Syariah Court and the Women's Charter. The late Chinese physician Professor Lee Kim Long specialised in acupuncture and was a respected physician in the medical circle. A total of 300 titles from his collection is available for public viewing at the Donors' Gallery on Level 10 of the National Library. Happy reading! We look forward to receiving your comments and feedback.

Special 30th anniversary of SARE, Southeast Asian Review of English, with particular emphasis on Singaporean and Malaysian literature. Special issue co-edited by Neil Murphy, Koh Tai Ann, and Susan Philip.

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This paper probes the connection between the established structures of censorship operating in the narratives of race and culture and their psychological implications on the subjective interiority of the central character, Suwen, in Suchen Christine Lim’s “Fistful of Colours”. By focusing on the foreclosure of subject-formation through Suwen’s failure of voice and agency, the text stresses the debilitating effects of state and cultural authority on the gendered subjectivity through her internalized condition of un-freedom. At the same time, trauma in the form of sexual molestation also contributes to reinforcing the inner mechanisms of self-censorship. The recurring textual silences and voids, projected by the corporeal body’s daily rituals of avoidance and self-censorship, not only reaffirm the psychical wounds and dislocations working in the interiority, but also point to places where creative expressions of the censored self are enabled. This double-edged paradox deconstructs the narrow interpretation of censorship as a form of foreclosure, while attaching different connotations to the discourse of censorship as a means to locating different spaces of expression and agency.

I'm going to begin by playing a video of the official theme song for the National Day Parade in Singapore in 2012, "Love at First Light," performed by Olivia Ong and Natanya Tan. As one would expect, the song presents a highly idealized image of the nation-state and city of Singapore and what it means to be Singaporean. In my paper I want to discuss two writers, Huzir Sulaiman, a Malaysian author who now lives and works in Singapore, and the Singaporean Malay poet, short-story writer, blogger, and playwright Alfian Sa'at to show some of the ways that the idealized "Singapore" that we see and listen to in the NDP video can be seen and thought about in a different light. I have to admit at the outset that the idea of beginning my paper by playing "Love at First Light" was inspired by a caustic, frame by frame critique of the video that Alfian posted on his Facebook blog in July 2012. You can get a good idea of the tone of Alfian's commentary from his observations about the opening frame: "The whole video is shot with pastel palettes beloved of high-end condo ads. There's genteel lens flares, hazy light through white curtains and panoramic shots of the kinds of views that 1% of Singaporeans enjoy." I saw a performance of Huzir Sulaiman's hilarious play about the Malaysian atomic bomb, Atomic Jaya, in Singapore on October 27, 2013, performed by Karen Tan and Claire Wong. In the discussion that followed the performance, Huzir, Karen, and Claire reflected on the various ways in which the gendering of the play has been constantly reimagined since its first production in 1998, the theme of the atom bomb and its ongoing, fetishistic role in the formation of identity in the developing world ever present wherever and whenever the play was performed. In this paper I want to discuss representations of power and sexuality in Huzir's play in relation to similar themes in