Chapter 11 - At Home in the World

Summary

Port cities on the island of Singapore from the fourteenth century onwards have produced a dichotomy in literary representation. On the one hand, the city is monumental, its expanding physical infrastructure subsumed within solid historical developmental narratives in which dystopian and utopian visions of governance co-exist. On the other, the port offers the possibility of fluidity, an opening to the flows of peoples, culture, and trade. As a site of writing in many languages, Singapore exemplifies the concerns of world literature: interlinguistic practices, migration, networks of publishing and audiences in which the global continually returns.This chapter uses the concept of translocality to enable two intellectual moves. First, it moves us beyond a binarism between city and port, structure and fluidity in Singapore literary studies, in which literary texts are always seen as promoting fluidity as a critique of structure, rather than as acts of building, self-making and development. Second, the translocal experience of Singapore may offer a heuristic for the study of world literature, in which dystopian accounts of the imbrication of markets, reading publics, prizes, and creative writing programs with neoliberalism are often countered through utopian close readings of the transcendent possibilities of individual literary texts.