Singapore Literature and Culture

Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts

Angelia Mui Cheng Poon, Angus Whitehead, Angelia Mui Cheng Poon, Angus Whitehead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315307732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Section III

9 Super-Diversity and Its Implications in Two Singapore Texts

Wai-chew Sim

Is there no one who can articulate a future other than the superficially material, riding upon the growth of the nations around us, living off their energy, their endeavour, as we sip whisky in our secure little havens?

—Philip Jeyaretnam, Abraham’s Promise (1995)

Overnight, there were millions of newcomers crowding the housing estates and trains, all speaking new languages and dialects that Fazil didn’t recognise […]

—Claire Tham, The Inlet (2013)

Introduction

Singapore has in recent years greatly altered its demographic profile, opening its doors to a range of non-resident migrants and permanent residents who now make up almost 40 percent of its 5.4 million population.¹ The numbers include inflows from formations that historically provided transfers to the city-state; but Singapore is now also home—temporary, permanent or one among several—to many subjects from non-“traditional” sites including a range of rich, middle-income, and poor countries. The changes stem from the neoliberal thinking that dominates the polity, in particular the incumbent regime’s stance that, because they are “highly rational,” they can help solve the problems of “declining birth rates among Singaporeans and the difficulty in finding workers from its small citizen base to perform work at opposite ends of the skill-set spectrum” (Yew xiii).² Beyond the muzzled mainstream media, however, the influx has generated great discussion in a variety of online forums, a lot of it expressing dissatisfaction and unease. Some of this language articulates public anger at the inadequacy of the infrastructure spending disbursed to handle the expanded numbers. Other parts of it enunciate a more problematic hostility levelled at, so to speak, the stranger in the village, or what the local and international press calls xenophobia. As in the case of similar discourses that emerge from urban centres with significant migrant populations, the responses enact “a polarity between the public-citizenry that can do no wrong and foreigners whose foreignness is the sole condition and explanation for their behaviours,” even though their alterity or difference is “yet to be defined or concretely established” (Yew xiii–xiv). Unusually for its ultra-disciplined population, the unease culminated in the holding of a large public rally in February 2013. A rare occurrence for the republic, the protest was also one of the largest in decades.³

In order to gain greater purchase on the cultural ramifications of this influx, this chapter compares two texts that address recent migration experience in Singapore. Written in English, The Inlet (published in 2013 by Claire Tham) uses a real-life drowning mishap involving a Chinese mainlander to structure a series of vignettes and meditations on how transnational flows affect the lives of middle-class Singaporeans. To a degree the mentioned changes necessitate an alteration in the country’s whole sense of self, in taken for granted assumptions about self, other, and speech community. To an extent, The Inlet also provides a mainstream (English-speaking) Chinese-Singaporean view on developments, showcasing the strata’s affinity to language policies initiated in the 1970s that have turned Singapore into a largely English-speaking country, which is to say that it seeks to maintain this hegemony. Written in Chinese, Bai He: A China Mother’s Singapore Love Affinities (published in 2005 by Xi Dan), is a semi-fictional memoir of a China-born woman who enrols her child in a Singapore school. The memoir returns the gaze directed at the immigrant other, articulating the views of grassroots migrants who speak the vernacular and whose greater prominence on the streets and in social life have sparked anxieties in the former group regarding the dangers of re-”Sinocisation.” Taken together, the mentioned texts give purchase on processes of self- and other-definition undertaken by both migrants and receiving society. Read against the lens provided by social theorist Steven Vertovec’s work on “super-diversity,” I argue that they urge a rethinking of the ethnie-essentialising schemas that dominate Singapore’s cultural imaginary, and that work in effect to discipline the population. Among other things, this means giving pause to the rhetoric of communalism that is ubiquitous in Singapore cultural life, and recognising the pluriform, multivalent nature of its speech communities.

In his seminal 2007 article discussing developments in London/Britain, Vertovec argues cogently that, in order to successfully negotiate the challenges thrown up by contemporary, migration-driven diversity, we must move beyond parsing the phenomenon “only in terms of ethnicity,” as is generally the case in academia and the public arena (1025). Other “multi-dimensional conditions and processes” need to be weighed (1050), including “additional variables” such as:

differential immigration statuses and their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents.… The interplay of these factors is what is meant here, in summary fashion, by ‘super-diversity.” (1025)

Vertovec notes that the same nationality or cultural group may harbour individuals with widely differing statuses. Some may be “citizens,” others “refugees, asylum-seekers, persons granted exceptional leave to remain, [or] undocumented migrants” (1039). Sticking with ethnie or “multiculturalism” as the main foci of analysis will not give a full picture if we want to accurately assess the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. We need instead “better …ways of looking” at how society is getting “increasingly complex, composite, layered and unequal,” meaning that we need to find ways to reconcile different kinds of differences (Vertovec 2014, n.pag.).

In my opinion, what Vertovec terms super-diversity is extendable to some of the societal complexification that Singapore has experienced in recent years. While not as variegated as metropolitan centres such as London and New York, Singapore is clearly a more multifarious place compared to even ten years ago. As noted in the second epigraph, its social landscape is now traversed by languages that many local-born denizens would register as alienating. I think the constellation of ideas linked by the term provides an important critical lens, and I hope therefore to lay the groundwork for its use in local literary criticism through deployment in this chapter, the better to nurture a “new school of Singapore studies” that Aljunied and Heng deem timely to counter the officially-sanctioned scripts that constrain public discourse in the country (13).

In what follows, I explica...