Unmaking Sense: Short Fiction and Social Space in Singapore

Abstract

Any account of the postcolonial short story in Singapore needs to begin with a certain amount of necessary groundwork. Singapore’s multi-ethnic and multilingual literary culture calls into question the idea of a single cultural tradition for which reference to ‘the short story’ in the singular might suggest. And while Singapore as a nation-state did emerge from a history of colonization, its future is not necessarily conditioned by that past. An economically developed city-state strategically located between two rising global powers, India and China, Singapore is in many ways hypermodern, having already long encountered many of the contradictions regarding social inequality, multiculturalism and state surveillance that now trouble the postcolonial cities of former colonial powers. If short stories in Singapore defamiliarize readers from the social space of the city-state they also, perhaps more significantly, suggest the need to interrogate the notion of the postcolonial itself, and in particular the implicit privileging of the West in the context of global history. Singapore has literatures in each of its four official languages, but it may be that English-language writing occupies a particularly important nexus within the literary field that we often designate as postcolonial (see below). With this goal in mind, this chapter will explore the short stories of three contemporary Singapore writers — Suchen Lim, Alfian Sa’at and Wena Poon — and the manner in which each writer responds critically to elements of a contemporary Singaporean social space: such examination, however, needs to be prefaced by a brief account of the place of the English-language short story in Singapore.