[Sfts-faculty] My essay on two Singaporean sf novels

[Sherryl Vint]

Congratulations, Weihsin. Thanks for sharing your work.

Sherryl Vint (she/her)
Professor and Chair, Department of English

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On Fri, 13 May 2022 at 00:41, Weihsin Gui <weihsing at ucr.edu> wrote:

> Dear SFCS faculty,
>
> My essay on "Neoliberalism and Two Novels of Speculative Fiction from
> Singapore" has just been published in the latest issue of The Global South
> journal (vol. 15 no. 1 2021). In it I talk about Surrogate Protocol by Tham
> Cheng-E and The Gatekeeper by Nuraliah Norasid. This is part of a special
> issue on "Contextualizing the 21st-Century Anglophone Novel" edited by Shun
> Kiang.
>
> Here's the abstract for my essay:  "This essay discusses two novels from
> Singapore—Tham Cheng-E’s Surrogate Protocol (2017) and Nuraliah Norasid’s
> The Gatekeeper (2017)—as speculative fiction (sf ), a broader term for
> narratives that contain science fictional or fantastic qualities but are
> particularly invested in socio-political questions rather than resolutely
> celebrating a techno-scientific future. Through extrapolation and
> speculation, Singaporean speculative fiction snatches truth from the jaws
> of reality. Because these novels rely on imaginative speculation and
> extrapolation rather than historical verisimilitude and authenticity, they
> describe and invent a world that is similar to but a few steps removed from
> Singapore’s status quo. Such estrangement allows the novels to create a
> cognitive space in which readers can assess and question this status quo
> and sidestep the government’s out-of-bounds or OB markers. By extrapolating
> from Singapore’s present, they may evade a censorious state regime because
> their narratives imagine possible futures rather than revisit a politically
> sensitive past. Surrogate Protocol and The Gatekeeper raise questions about
> Singapore’s ethno-racial politics and state-sponsored promotion of
> biomedical technology and research. They employ technoscience and myth as
> novums (Darko Suvin’s term) to speculate about socio-cultural structures
> and strictures in Singapore. Although the novels do not offer explicit
> blueprints for socio-cultural change, through the cognitively estranging
> processes of extrapolation and speculation they question accepted norms
> regarding racialization, biopower, and gendered identities in Singapore.
> The novels’ protagonists try to resist the self-optimization called for by
> neoliberalism’s technology of subjectivity, even if they may eventually be
> compromised by its technology of subjection."
>
> The essay is attached, and I hope it might be of interest to those of us
> who are interested in global or postcolonial sf.
>
> -- Regards,
> WG
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Weihsin Gui (he/him/his) weihsing at ucr.edu <weihsin.gui at ucr.edu>
> Associate Professor of English
> University of California-Riverside
> MLA Southeast Asia Forum mailing list <http://eepurl.com/hqu4cP>
>
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