Histories of the Present: Reading Contemporary Singapore Novels between the Local and the Global
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My paper responds to a growing a number of literary works written about Singapore which participate in a complex transnational politics of representation. Recent novels such as the three discussed here--Fiona Cheong's Shadow Theatre, Vyvyane Loh's Breaking the Tongue, and Shirley Lim's Joss & Gold are the products of both their authors' long residence in Singapore and their experience of expatriation, of living elsewhere. Published outside Singapore, these texts frequently respond to the desires of global reading communities whose members have little knowledge of the city-state, and the novels may initially appear ahistorical and exoticising when read in an historically informed Singaporean context. Active critical engagement with these popular and widely-disseminated texts, however, is fruitful in enabling us to reconsider both literary canonicity Singapore, and the manner in which cultural production engages in a politics of the everyday in the city-state; it also offers us opportunities to meditate on the possible exclusions of metropolitan critical practice. This paper thus discusses the possibility of a located critical reading practice that allows attention to be given to the politics of representation in individual literary texts and the manner in which they, in David Palumbo Liu's words, historicize the present. Such a reading practice offers the possibility of disrupting both a parochial insistence on local authenticity on the one hand, and a dehistoricized critical recuperation of the novels into such categories as Asian American or postcolonial on the other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".