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Description
(Text)
This book looks at culturally significant, English-language texts produced in Singapore in the last 20 years by writers such as Balli Kaur Jaswal, Alfian Sa'at, Claire Tham, Amanda Lee Koe, Ng Yi-Sheng and Kevin Kwan. It provides an analysis sensitive to the writers' socio-political and cultural contexts, and shows how Singapore's Anglophone literature successfully disrupts the government's narrative on transforming the island into a global city. By asking difficult questions, challenging hegemonic perspectives and exploring alternatives, the writers interrogate the country's colonial history, its post-colonial Cold War development, and the normalization of totalizing narratives. Their texts also grapple with key aspects of contemporary Singapore society: its official multiracialism, forms of inequality, distribution of privilege, and gender and sexual politics. By connecting these texts to developments in postcolonial literary criticism, cosmopolitanism and globalization studies, thisbook sheds light on the ideological and cultural forces at work in Singapore society today.
(Table of content)
Chapter 1 Introduction.- Chapter 2 Growing Pains: Minority Subjects in Singapore in Balli Kaur Jaswal's Inheritance and Sugarbread.- Chapter 3 Upending Knowledge: Decoloniality in Alfian Sa'at's Malay Sketches and Merdeka/ / .- Chapter 4 Facing the World: Global Capitalism, Wealth Preservation and the Singapore Chinese Family in Crazy Rich Asians and Soy Sauce for Beginners.- Chapter 5 Form and the Cosmopolitan Imaginary: Reading Claire Tham's The Inlet and Akshita Nanda's Nimita's Place.- Chapter 6 Tapping into Weird: Contemporary Short Fiction by Amanda Lee Koe and Ng Yi Sheng.- Chapter 7 Conclusion.
(Review)
Global City Dilemmas consists of a series of chapters that first contextualize Singaporean literary texts from the first two decades of the new millennium both theoretically and historically, and then proceed to nuanced close readings. Global City Dilemmas is one of a growing number of recent monographs reading Singapore literature and other, largely Anglophone, cultural texts through the lens of literary theory . This is an important, timely and unique book. (Philip Holden, South East Asia Research, January 23, 2025)
(Author portrait)
Angelia Poon is Associate Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
