Literature in Singapore is written in the country’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. The various literatures flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of print culture in the British colony, but after independence in 1965, English became emphasized in both the education system and society at large as part of the new government’s attempts to modernize the country. Chinese, Malay, and Tamil were seen as mother tongue languages to provide Singaporeans with cultural ballast while English was regarded as a language for administration, business, and scientific and technological development. Correspondingly, literatures in other languages than English reached a plateau in terms of writerly output and readership during the 1970s and 1980s. However, since 1999, with the state’s implementation of the Renaissance City Plan to revitalize arts and culture in Singapore, there have been various initiatives to increase the visibility of contemporary Singaporean writing both within the country itself and on an international scale. Translation plays a key role in bridging the linguistic and literary divides wrought by the state’s mother tongue policies, with several works by Cultural Medallion winners in different languages translated into English, which remains at present the shared language in Singapore. Literary anthologies are also invaluable forms through which the concepts of a national literature and national identity are expressed and negotiated. A number of anthologies involving Singaporean authors and those from other countries also highlight the growing international presence of and interest in Singaporean literature. Several anthologies also focus on the topic of urban space, city life, and the rapid transformation of Singapore’s physical environment. Writings about gender and sexuality have also become more prominent in single-author collections or edited anthologies, with writers exploring various inventive and experimental narrative forms. A number of poets and writers are also established playwrights, and theater has historically been and continues to be an extremely vital form of creative expression and cultural production. Graphic novels, crime and noir fiction, and speculative and science fiction publications are also on the rise, with the awarding of the Singapore Literature Prize to Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye signaling that these genres merit serious literary consideration. A number of literary publications and materials related to Singaporean literature can be found on the Internet, such as the journal Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the website Singapore Poetry, and the database Poetry.sg. Various nonprofit organizations are also working toward increasing public awareness about literature through events such as Singapore Poetry Writing Month, the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition, the Singapore Writers Festival and National Poetry Festival, and also through projects that exhibit poetry in train stations and on public thoroughfares.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

"Suspended Nameless in the Limbo State":

Neoliberalism and Queer Caribbean Diasporas

by

Jessica Marie Best

Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English

University of California, Riverside, December 2013

Dr. Weihsin Gui, Chairperson

This project seeks to reveal the heterogeneous cultural histories embedded within queer diasporic Caribbean writing that challenge the United States' political, economic, and cultural hegemony in the post-9/11 world. The goal is to examine the complicities, challenges, and escape routes created by queer imaginings, both utopic and pragmatic, rather than reconfigure essential characteristics of Caribbean diasporas as key components of nationalist, diasporic, or postcolonial identity. In revealing how different forms of desire, kinship, racial belonging, temporality, and positioning exist within and exceed our current notions of nation and diaspora, this dissertation goes beyond an understanding of the terms "queer" and "diaspora" as identities resistant to the nation-state and sees them as working towards a dismantling of neoliberal discourses and their hegemonic framework within the cultural spaces of North America and the Caribbean.

This project will contextualize the nation to the settler-colonial space of the North American continent. It will not only consider how foreign policy directly relates to domestic concerns, but will take as its central understanding that "the state has always operated through sovereign power exacted through racial and colonial violence" (Smith, "American Studies" 310, original emphasis). This project will use queer diasporic writing to imagine alternative forms of being and belonging, while never presuming that "the United States should or will always continue to exist" (Smith, "American Studies" 312). Thus, it does not affirm nor celebrate state power or governmentality exercised by the U.S. state, even though it will examine authors and texts that exist within its national and cultural borders. Indeed, I will take a theoretically comparative approach by examining the intersections between postcolonial and queer theories, along with feminist, indigenous, and trans theories, to examine contemporary queer North American writing from the Caribbean diaspora. I employ these cultural discourses as tools for critiquing and dismantling dominant heteropatriarchal institutions, neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and homonormativity, which are key cultural and political components to United States hegemony.

This dissertation engages Sri Lankan Anglophone literary texts to propose how we can attend to war and disaster without using a totalizing narrative of grief and loss. With the help of several texts—Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s “Hippocrates,” Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts, Jean Arasanayagam’s “All is Burning,” Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, Simon Harris and Neluka Silva’s The Rolled Back Beach: Stories from the Tsunami, and Hasanthika Sirisena’s “The Other One,” “Third Country National,” and “War Wounds”—my project illuminates how contemporary moral and political economies around trauma manifest in problematic ways, and celebrates how literary representations of those excluded from institutionalized knowledge can dismantle these economies. My research urges academics situated within postcolonial studies and critical trauma studies to disrupt the myths of our disciplinary training. I underscore the reminder that trauma and its effects should not be universally cast as pathology or permanent condition. Moreover, my dissertation alerts us to the transformative power of attending to a diversity of stories about experiences and meanings of what we understand as trauma.

This project explores a feedback loop between the State, military, terrorism studies, and the literary by examining how global anglophone literature concerning the War on Terror addresses the outcomes of surveillance, detainment, imprisonment, and torture upon the lives of Muslim subjects within cosmopolitan spaces across the world. I argue that Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005), Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs (2010), Rajia Hassib’s A Pure Heart (2019) Fatima Bhutto’s Runaways (2019) are uniquely positioned to address the worldwide economic and social realities engendered by a discourse of the imperial imagination in which religion and race are constitutive of an ever-present and ever-elusive enemy from within. Each of the texts I explore in the chapters that follow take different approaches in portraying life within a Western secular paradigm, highlighting the resistance and consequences to their protagonists as they attempt to carve out space for faith, sovereignty, and political collectivity amidst the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This dissertation argues that Asian American historical fiction of the Long Sixties does not merely depict the living and lived realities of immigrant lives, but also performs the social transformation sought by the activist groups that first articulated Asian American identity. Drawing on the founding documents of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at UC Berkeley, the first group to advance the collective identity category of “Asian American” and to define Asian America as a flexible “sliding structure,” my dissertation shows that the “sliding structure” is, and always has been, the means by which radicalism is expressed in Asian American literature. My analysis builds upon new formalism to demonstrate that “sliding” between narrative tropes and affective registers allows Asian American historical novelists of the Long Sixties to capture and critique the array of global conditions and national cultures that gave rise to Asian America.