Global City Dilemmas and Anglophone Singapore Literature: Intersectional Politics and Cultural Negotiations in the 21st Century (2024)

By: Angelia Poon

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Synopsis: 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.