Panel: Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Negotiations
Copanelists: Dejin Xu and Zhong Yan
Over the last decade, a series of sophisticated diasporic novels, largely women’s fictional autobiographies written by first-generation female Singaporean migrants to the USA and Canada, have appeared on the market. Their fictional characters’ complex inter-cultural subjectivities, accessed through idioms offered by non-Singaporean literary imaginaries such as in Black and Asian American women’s writings, are welcome contrasts to the unpromising stereotypes often found in local Singapore literature and formed through rigid local discourses of race and ethnicity. In Singapore, recent scholarship has been moving towards charting local subjectivities in terms of critical inter-ethnic and transethnic cosmopolitanisms as a strategy to counter a state governmentality that seeks to organize and delimit local life and politics along the boundaries of “race.” If the cosmopolitan may be understood as a way of “living at home abroad or abroad at home,”1 this paper seeks to grasp what a ‘Singaporean’ cosmopolitanism might entail by reading some of these transnational texts, Fiona Cheong’s Scent of the Gods (1993) and Shadow Theatre (2002), Lydia Kwa’s This Place called Absence (2003), and Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue (2005). It will map the ways in which metropolitan idioms and paths of desire contact and transform Singapore as sign in these writers’ bid to name themselves as transnational Singaporean subjects. In this regard, it will give special attention to the translation of the female ghost figure of Black American and Chinese-American women’s texts into the Pontianak (the vampire figure of Malay culture) who provides significatory access to hitherto inaccessible “buried” Singaporean female histories/memories and Southeast Asian cosmologies. Studying these quests of identity, the paper will ask whether cosmopolitanism or transnational identity may be theorized as cultural translation where the local text haunts and disrupts the coherence of the global.
Note
1. Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh
Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Public
Culture 12.3 (2000): 577–90.
Matilda Gabrielpillai is Assistant Professor with the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her teaching and research areas include postcolonial and women’s literatures and materialist psychoanalytical studies of discourses of race, gender, and nation. More recently, she has become interested in exploring the representation of transnational identities in contemporary diasporic women’s selfwriting. She is a former journalist, and obtained her doctoral degree at the University of British Columbia.