Becoming Singapore

By Ann Ang

Review of Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore by Cheryl Naruse (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023)

Yeo Tze Yang - Serious Business (2018), Oil on canvas, 152 x 260cm
Image description: The painting portrays a crowd of elderly male individuals, crowded around a game of chess between two men. The figures, rendered realistically, are lounging in plastic chairs or standing. They wear collared shirts, and stare intensely at the game of chess. On the right, a Chinese-language newspaper is placed under a metal mug.

Becoming Global Asia charts the evolution of Singapore as global Asia—an ambitious claim for any city in a region that extends from the Trans-Pacific through East Asia into the Indian subcontinent. “Global” and “Asian” are two descriptors that most would accept in association with “Singapore.” This is usually seen as a testament to the nation-state’s startling and relentless transformation from Third World to First. Cheryl Naruse’s new volume of cultural and literary criticism examines “Singapore” as brand, symbolic nexus, and mobile signifier, itself a model other countries envy and emulate. Beginning from the well-worn account that credits rightfully, to a significant extent, the nation-state’s efforts at good governance and visionary planning, Naruse’s monograph pushes beyond to recognise the importance of diverse co-producers of “Singapore” as a “globally significant bearer of cultural capital” (2).

At many points, the western spectator and commentator is reflexively invoked, from William Gibson’s oft-cited description of Singapore as “Disneyland with a death penalty” to the UK’s post-Brexit aspiration to become a Singapore-on-Thames. But the book is most innovative when it insists on identifying and reading cultural texts such as the weekly feature “Singaporean Abroad” in The Straits Times and the independently published “50 Red Dots”; as well as reading alongside unexpected consumers of culture: the anonymous audience of massively popular horror anthologies published from the 1980s, for instance. Naruse’s methodology remains literary and aesthetic in its determined focus to unearth “the formal characteristics of these contemporary genres” (6). By refusing the typical criterion of originality and aesthetic exceptionalism, Becoming Global Asia opens the way to read the significatory agency of materials as diverse as political ephemera, industry brochures and multilingual anthologies, while offering insights into the “new narrative logics, aesthetics, and the political unconscious that underpin Global Asia and Singapore’s transition into a knowledge economy” after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 (6).

Yeo Tze Yang - More Poetic Bullshit (2022), Oil and sand on canvas, 61 x 152cm
Image description: The painting depicts plants growing against an off-white wall. The leafy plants climbing along the wall are lush and green. Various items— aluminum cans, plastic bags— litter the ground around the plants. In the middle of the painting is a V-shaped metal grate. 

The contemporary genres discussed in Becoming Global Asia make up its four body chapters: the cultural history of Singapore literary anthologies, the population aesthetics of overseas Singaporeans, the coming-of-career narrative in the context of developmentalism, and the princess fantasy of Singapore as an irresistibly luxurious destination for the western consumer, now swooning and overcome. Each is surprising and refreshing for examining how Singapore is aestheticized and transnationalised, made visible and decodable to the world, while also tactically accruing financial and symbolic capital for the island-nation. Neither is the language nor circulation of these genres unexamined: a key term in the book is anglophone legibility, or Singapore’s cultural readability as westernised, which adds to Singapore’s soft power. Yet however readable and porous it may appear, as Naruse explains, the city is not reducible to or comprehensible within western liberal democracy as a frame. Singapore as global Asia is readable but strategically its own—an ironic reversal of colonial reading logics where the western gaze produces knowledge about the other.

Among the many insights presented in the volume is the observation that Singapore no longer appears to be the illiberal, sterile place of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Naruse’s focus on the shorter histories of Singapore allows her argument to break away from the longer historical construction of the nation through the events of British colonialism and the rise of a complicit postcolonial state (126). Concurrently, Singapore and Singaporeans are treated less as nation and citizen, and more as nexus and a citizen-subject possessing a deep interiority in the contemporary transpacific. Aside from foregrounding the presence of overseas Singaporeans, the volume gives credence to the citizen’s reluctance and exhaustion while participating in a state-driven national project of developmentalism. Naruse describes Singapore novels in which one’s career is the equivalent of the bildungsroman as the coming-of-career narrative. She observes how the problems of living labour are remedied through the individualist pleasures of the postcolonial work ethic. Where earlier novels like If We Dream Too Long (1972) ends with the protagonist Kwang Meng refusing the industriousness of the manufacturing economy because he derives no pleasure from such work, Chiah Deng of Mammon Inc. (2001) experiences the product of herself in her career as an aesthetic delight (95). Likewise, in the chapter discussing the rise of popular literary anthologies, the anonymous reader of amateur-written horror tales begins to take pleasure in national culture, in its non-institutionalised and popular forms. Becoming Global Asia recognises how the Singapore subject exhibits an interiorised capacity for pleasure (dare we say joy?) sorely lacking in sociopolitical studies of the city. In this volume, the Singapore individual is more than producer, consumer or human capital. Perhaps what is beyond the scope of the book is a fuller treatment of the Singaporean subject as thinker and producer of knowledge, rather than the object of affect.

Yeo Tze Yang - Getting Back (2017), Oil on canvas, 122 x 152 cm
Image description: The painting depicts a crowd of pedestrians in a realistic style. In the foreground, a child in a dark blue shirt is walking forward. Slightly behind the child is a man with gray hair in a purple shirt, looking to the right. In the middle ground, a man wearing a white shirt and a sling bag seems to be smiling as he walks. To the right, a figure carrying a brown bag has their back turned to us, the only figure walking in the opposite direction from most of the pedestrians. The scene, rendered mostly in shadows, seems to occur at nighttime.

The volume’s boldest conceptual gambit resides in its theorisation of “postcolonial capitalism.” Recognising that Singapore’s coming to independence was mostly facilitated, rather than the result of a decolonial struggle, the book’s introduction acknowledges the city-state’s continuity with colonialism but resists the erasure of postcoloniality through the term “global” (12). Instead, Becoming Global Asia enacts its own decolonial gesture by constructing a framework in which the postcolonial energies of Singapore’s multifarious connections with global capital are made legible for critique. Postcolonial capitalism describes how capitalist cultures are “motivated, rationalised, and strategized through a consciousness of colonial subordination and racial capitalism” (9). Unlike other scholarly studies, which approach Asian economies and global Asia through neoliberalism, postcolonial capitalism locates these within the historical trajectory of decolonising nationalisms following the postwar restructuring of the world system into a three-world order. Though the Asian tiger economies would choose to distance themselves from the combative and oppositional tenor of anticolonial movements, they do so in order to claim emergent power on the global stage, marshalling their productive capacities and jockeying for a share of the global market. In Becoming Global Asia, this claim is identified as postcolonial—a move that for those familiar with the East Asian context, reads as refreshingly productive, while for others who remain staunchly opposed to capitalist logics, may seem insufficiently resistant.

For the most part, this new monograph is successfully postcolonial in balancing an overdue acknowledgement of the capitalist state’s transnational grasping for power, with an examination of cultural texts that foreground other actors in the construction of Singapore as global Asia. In the expanding field of postcolonial studies, which has seen regions such as Eastern Europe and East Asia identified as postcolonial, Becoming Global Asia revisits a long neglected area once identified as Malaya, and mostly known today for the city-state called Singapore, on its own terms, and with deep intuitive awareness of both its successes and limitations.

Yeo Tze Yang - Man Waiting On The Platform (2020), Oil on canvas, 100 x 55cm
Image description: The painting depicts a gray-haired individual with his back turned to the viewer. He seems to be looking down. He is wearing a wrinkled, white shirt and black pants, and holds a bag in each hand. He stands behind the yellow line on a subway platform. In the background, behind the glass panes of the subway platform, is a night view of an urban setting with tall buildings and cars. 

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Ann Ang is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research has been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and ELH. X: @Ann_Ang_

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YEO Tze Yang is a visual artist from Singapore. Self-taught and focusing on representational painting, he is a National University of Singapore graduate (2019, Southeast Asian Studies) who found acclaim with a Silver Award in the 2016 UOB Painting of the Year. Tze Yang elevates the overlooked in his surroundings into art, reflecting the human experience, while drawing inspiration from Realism across mediums. Tze Yang playfully subverts expectations of figurative painting, thereby exploring and combining other mediums of electronic media, sculpture and writing. Exhibited in prominent Singaporean institutions and across Asia, Tze Yang's works reside in institutional and private collections worldwide. He's currently represented by FOST Gallery (Singapore).

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