You can find the latest updates to the programme here: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/acwp/singapore-literature-symposium/
The Singapore Literature Symposium was organized by Professor C. J. W.-L. Wee and Dr. Cheryl Julia Lee of the Singapore Studies Research Cluster from 8-9 May 2021. Due to the pandemic, the symposium was held online.
This Symposium aimed to take stock of the directions and concerns that Singapore literature has taken since independence in 1965, from matters of nation-building and to newer complexities of working though the pluralisms of ‘national identity’ to more recent pluralisms, also addressed via more experimental literary formats and more flexible ideas of what might constitute ‘Singapore identity’. That is, what are the content and the literary formats that constitute a contemporary Singapore literature and how might we think of connections that may have persisted since independence? Given the wide scope of the matters at hand, the symposium’s focus is mainly, though not exclusively, on literature in English.
Video recordings of the various panels are available. For copyright and other reasons, any recordings should not be circulated. Recordings will be provided for personal research use only. For access to the video recordings, please direct all enquires to Jon Gresham.
Citation for the panels should follow this format: Wee, C. J. W.-L., Chew, Shirley, Poon, Angelia, and Isa Kamari, panellists. “Uncharted Territories, 1965-1990.” Singapore Literature Symposium, 8 May 2021. Web.
Panels
Opening Remarks
Literature in Singapore: Thinking Through Literary-Cultural Development Since 1965
Prof. C. J. W.-L. Wee
English, School of Humanities
Nanyang Technological University
Panel 1: Uncharted Territories, 1965-1990
8 May 2021
Chair: Professor C. J. W.-L. Wee
Speakers: Isa Kamari, Shirley Chew, Dr. Angelia Poon
With the birth of independent ‘Singapore’ as a political entity, what new realities and imaginative landscapes did Singapore writers face? How did Singapore writers see themselves and their work in relation to independence, and how did they translate independence into their work? Was independence for them a finished work or a work-in-progress?
Panel 2: Landscapes Lost and Found, 1990-2010
8 May 2021
Chair: Dr. Alvin Pang
Speakers: Ann Ang, Aaron Lee
A new generation of Singapore writers, growing up in newly-independent Singapore, was confronted by a changing landscape – altered beyond memory and recognition in tangible and intangible ways. How did they grapple with and represent these changes, and what new landscapes did they invent out of what remained? Did these landscapes extend beyond what a prior generation would have thought of as ‘Singapore’, and how did their new configurations of place influence what came later?
Panel 3: New Fictions
8 May 2021
Chair: Dr. Barrie Sherwood
Speakers: Dr. Balli Kaur Jaswal, Dr. Sharlene Teo
How has the Singapore novel evolved since the days of Goh Poh Seng’s If We Dream Too Long and Kirpal Singh’s China Affair? And what are some possible future developments for this literary form? What is the impact of creative writing programmes in higher education institutions; and of fiction prizes such as the Epigram Books Fiction Prize? How does contemporary Singapore fiction enter into dialogue with international fiction? This panel explores the contemporary Singapore novel and the exciting directions in which Singapore novelists are taking the form.
Panel 4: New Movements
9 May 2021
Chair: Dr. Cheryl Julia Lee
Speakers: Marylyn Tan, Nabilah Said, Stephanie Chan, O Thiam Chin
This panel seeks to trace the new trajectories that Singapore writing has embarked on in the new millennium. What new concerns preoccupy contemporary writers and what old ones continue to haunt them? What new forms can literature take and how do we understand these forms in the context of Singapore’s literary traditions? Are genres, categories, and borders still relevant ways of structuring experience, given today’s globalized world? How do the formation of online communities through initiatives such as SingPoWriMo impact the development of the literary scene?
Panel 5: New Tongues
9 May 2021
Chair: Theophilus Kwek
Speakers: Yulia Endang, Tan Dan Feng, Annaliza Bakri
Within a multicultural landscape, Singapore writing has always been engaged in the politics of language. This panel brings together Singapore writers whose works are important parts of the contemporary conversation about language and the way it informs our sense of self and belonging. Given that the panellists can all be understood as being involved in the act of translation, the panel will also discuss what it means to communicate in an age characterized by transnationalism. The panel will concern itself with more recent activity in the areas outlined, while being aware that the history of such language engagements is deep and longer.
Closing Remarks
Tracing Trajectories (Singapore Literature Symposium Summary)
Cheryl Julia Lee
English, School of Humanities
Nanyang Technological University
Re-centring the margins: Reflections on the Singapore Literature Symposium
Theophilus Kwek
About the Speakers
Panel 1: Uncharted Territories, 1965-1990
Dr. C. J. W.-L. Wee
C. J. W.-L. Wee is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University. He has held Visiting Fellowships at – among other institutions – the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University and, in 2020, the National Humanities Center in the USA. Wee is the author of The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007), a co-editor of Contesting Performance: Global Genealogies of Research (2010) and the editor of The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun: Plays in English, Volume Four (2012). He has interests in literature and the contemporary arts in Singapore, the curation of contemporary Asian art and regional popular culture.
Isa Kamari
Isa Kamari has written 11 novels, three collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, a book of essays on Singapore Malay poetry, a collection of theatre scripts and lyrics of three song albums. His novels in Malay have been translated into English, Turkish, Urdu, Arabic, Indonesian, Jawi, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Mandarin. His collections of essays and selected poems have been translated into English. His first novel in English, Tweet, was published in 2016. Isa was conferred the Southeast Asia Write Award from Thailand in 2006, the Singapore Cultural Medallion in 2007, the Anugerah Tun Seri Lanang from the Singapore Malay Language Council in 2009, and the Mastera Literary Award from Brunei Darussalam in 2018.
Dr. Angelia Poon
Angelia Poon is Associate Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests include postcolonial theory and contemporary Anglophone literature with a focus on issues pertaining to globalization and gender, class and racial subjectivities. She is co-editor of Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts (Routledge, 2017) and a co-editor of Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature in English (NUS Press, 2009). Other books include a monograph, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period: Colonialism and the Politics of Performance (Ashgate, 2008), and the co-edited volume, Sexuality and Contemporary Literature (Cambria Press, 2012). Her articles on Singapore literature and contemporary fiction have appeared as book chapters and in journals like Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, ARIEL, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Asian Studies Review.
Dr. Shirley Chew
Shirley Chew is Professor Emeritus, University of Leeds, UK; and currently a Professor at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests include Postcolonial and Contemporary World Literatures. Among her publications are the co-edited Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (1993), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (1999), Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (2001), and the Blackwell Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature (2010). More recent publications include chapters in books and journal articles on Olive Senior (2011 and 2015), Wole Soyinka (2012), Amitav Ghosh (2013), Boey Kim Cheng (2015), Anita Desai (2018) and Han Suyin (2021). She is the founding editor of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (2001-present), published from the University of Leeds and, since 2011, from Leeds and NTU. She was a judge of the David Cohen Literature Prize for 2013; and the Singapore Literature Prize (English Fiction category) for 2016.
Panel 2: Landscapes Lost and Found, 1990-2010
Dr. Alvin Pang
Alvin PANG, PhD, is a poet, writer, editor and translator whose broad creative practice spans over two decades of literary and related activities in Singapore and elsewhere. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English and the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages. His latest titles include WHAT HAPPENED: Poems 1997-2017 (2017) and UNINTERRUPTED TIME (2019). For his contributions to the literary arts, he has received the Young Artist Award, Singapore Youth Award and the JCCI Education Award, among other accolades. He serves on several advisory boards, including the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra, the peer-reviewed journal Axon: Creative Explorations and Rabbit: Journal of non-fiction poetry. His research interests include the possibilities of literary practice conducted across multiple languages, genres, careers and communities. He was appointed Adjunct Professor of RMIT University in 2021.
Ann Ang
Ann Ang is a D.Phil. candidate in English at Oxford and researches the inheritance of English as a literary language in South and South East Asia in the transnational moment, focusing on contemporary Anglophone writing from India, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. She is interested in the evolution of Englishes, narrative structures and the theorising of world literatures. Her articles and reviews are published in the Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation Review and Pedagogies: An International Journal and forthcoming from The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies and English Literary History (ELH). Ann is also a published writer of poetry and fiction, whose first book is Bang My Car, a collection of Singlish-English short stories (Math Paper Press, 2012). She has also co-edited two literary anthologies recently, Food Republic (2020) and Poetry Moves (2020), and is the coordinating editor of PR&TA.
Aaron Lee
Aaron Lee is a pilgrim poet, writing mentor, community organiser and ethics lawyer. He is acknowledged to have played a key part in the 1990’s renaissance of Singapore poetry, together with fellow poets such as Yong Shu Hoong and Alvin Pang. Lee has authored three collections of poetry (the second, Five Right Angles, was shortlisted for the 2008 Singapore Literature Prize). He co-edited several books including No Other City: the Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000) and Lines Spark Code (2017), an anthology of Singapore poetry for Cambridge “A”-level study. He has also served on the Steering Committee of the Singapore Writers Festival, moderating and speaking in many panels and workshops. Lee was featured international poet for the 2018 Perth Poetry Festival. In 2014, Lee and his wife, the national artist Namiko Chan Takahashi, co-founded the Laniakea Culture Collective, an interdisciplinary, intercultural arts practice.
Panel 3: New Fictions
Dr. Barrie Sherwood
Barrie Sherwood is Assistant Professor in English at Nanyang Technological University.
O Thiam Chin
O Thiam Chin’s short stories have appeared in Best New Singaporean Short Stories Volumes 1-3, A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories, and ONE – The Anthology: Short Stories from Singapore’s Best Authors, as well as in The Cincinnati Review, Mānoa, The Brooklyn Rail, World Literature Today, The International Literary Quarterly, Asia Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, and QLRS. Thrice longlisted for the Frank O’ Connor International Short Story Award, he is the author of Love, Or Something Like Love (2013), shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize. His debut novel, Now That It’s Over, won the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize (EBFP) in 2015 and also the Best Fiction title at the 2017 Singapore Book Awards. His latest novel, The Dogs (Penguin Random House SEA), was published in late 2020. He was a recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award in 2012.
Dr. Balli Kaur Jaswal
Balli Kaur Jaswal is the author of four novels, including Singapore Literature Prize finalist Sugarbread, and the international bestsellers Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows and The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters. Her debut novel Inheritance won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist award. Jaswal’s non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan.com, Harper’s Bazaar India and Salon.com, among other publications. A former national writer-in-residence at NTU and a recent graduate from its PhD program in Creative Writing, she is currently preparing for the 2022 release of her upcoming novel which is set in Singapore.
Dr. Sharlene Teo
Sharlene Teo’s debut novel Ponti (Picador, 2018) won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award, was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Award and Edward Stanford Fiction Award, longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and selected by Ali Smith as one of the best debut works of fiction of 2018. Her work has been translated into eleven languages, shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize and published in places such as the TLS, The Guardian, The London Magazine, Lit Hub, and the Daunt Books anthology At the Pond. She completed her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she received the 2012 Booker Prize Foundation scholarship and the 2013 David TK Wong Creative Writing Award. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program and is completing her second novel.
Panel 4: New Movements
Dr. Cheryl Julia Lee
Cheryl Julia Lee is an Assistant Professor with the English department at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include Southeast Asian literature and culture, contemporary Irish literature, and the dialogue between aesthetics and ethics. Her poetry collection, We Were Always Eating Expired Things, was published in 2014, and was nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize. Her other creative work can be found in QLRS, Icarus, and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is also currently the critical editor of prose.sg.
Marylyn Tan
Marylyn Tan is a queer, delicious, slutty, large-beasted, linguistics graduate, poet, and artist, who has been performing and disappointing since 2014. Her first volume of poetry, GAZE BACK (Singapore Lit Prize 2020, Lambda loser), is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Her work trades in the conventionally vulgar, radically pleasurable, and unsanctioned, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Marylyn is the Poetry Reader for Singapore Unbound, founder of multidisciplinary arts collective DIS/CONTENT (hellodiscontent.carrd.co) and can be found in her habitat at instagr.am/marylyn.orificial or facebook.com/mrylyn.
Stephanie Chan
Stephanie Chan (also known as Stephanie Dogfoot) is a writer, performer and arts organiser. They have won national poetry slams in Singapore and the UK and have performed their work in 12 different countries. A big believer in the power of live performance to build community, they have been producing and hosting poetry, storytelling and stand-up comedy events in the UK and Singapore since 2010. In 2017, Stephanie founded Spoke & Bird, a poetry night which features local and international artists. Their first collection, Roadkill for Beginners (Math Paper Press) was published in 2019. They were recently awarded an NAC Digital Presentation Grant to co-produce An Intermediate Guide to Roadkill, a short film based on poems from the collection. They are also a co-editor of EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices, coming out in June 2021.
Nabilah Said
Nabilah Said is a Singapore-based playwright, editor, and poet. Her plays have been presented in Singapore and London, including a dark comedy about Singaporean Muslim women, Inside Voices, which won the Origins Award for Outstanding New Work at London’s VAULT Festival in 2019. The play was also published by UK publisher Nick Hern Books. In Singapore, ANGKAT, a festival commission of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2019, won three Life Theatre Awards, including Best Original Script in 2019. Nabilah is a former arts correspondent with Singapore’s national broadsheet, The Straits Times, and is currently a theatre critic and editor of Southeast Asian arts website, ArtsEquator.com. She is also a published poet. Nabilah holds an M.A. in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, as a recipient of the Tan Ean Kiam Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. nabilahsaid.com.
Panel 5: New Tongues
Theophilus Kwek
Theophilus Kwek has published four collections of poetry, two of which were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His poems, essays and translations have won numerous awards, and appeared in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, The London Magazine, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Recent works include his latest collection Moving House (2020), as well as a bilingual collaboration with composer Alex Ho for the National Opera Studio in London. He previously served as Editor-at-Large for Asymptote, and is now part of the editorial team for the newly-launched journal PR&TA.
Yulia Endang
Yulia Endang is from Ciamis, West Java-Indonesia and has been working in Singapore for almost 15 years. In addition to writing she enjoys photography which she posted on her social media platforms. Yulia was awarded second place in Singapore’s 2019 Migrant Worker Poetry Competition. As an introvert, writing has been giving her another open door to communicate and express her feeling, opinions and responds. Currently she is one of team leaders at Uplifters (A Nonprofit Organization which provides free online money management course for domestic workers around the world) and she also has a sharing English with a small group of migrant workers on the weekend.
An article by Yulia Endang on Asian Books Blog: The Burden of the Language: A third-language poet speaks
Tan Dan Feng
Tan Dan Feng began working as a professional translator in 1993. He has translated for print, stage and screen. In addition to being a practitioner, he has been actively involved in translation research, teaching and advocacy. He was a member of the Programme Committee of the Asia Pacific Translation and Interpreting Forum, the apex translation platform for the region. His published works include Living in Babel: Singapore Literature in Translation (2017) and Memorandum: A Sinophone Singaporean Short Story Reader (2020).
Annaliza Bakri
Annaliza Bakri holds a Master of Arts from the Department of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include the interplay of ideology and ethnicity in shaping the dominant narratives in literature, language education in a multicultural society and the intersection between translation, history and humanity. Her writings, interviews and literary translations have been published by Prairie Schooner, Brooklyn Rail, Transnational Literature, s/pores, Budi Kritik (2019), Portside Review and Centre for Stories. She edited and translated a poetry anthology featuring places on this tiny red dot by the best Singapore Malay poets titled Sikit-Sikit Lama-lama Jadi Bukit (2017) and she co-translated award-winning poet, Alvin Pang’s What Gives Us Our Names (2011) into the Malay – Yang Menamakan Kita (2019).