“A delicate pellet of dust”: Dissident flash fictions from contemporary Singapore

Abstract

The city state of Singapore is predicated on comprehensive urban planning, beginning with colonial rule in 1819 and continuing to the present day with the 2014 Master Plan – an urban planning map that is hyperlinked down to the smallest plot of land. This plan manifests the state’s pragmatic cartographies of power, which continually produce and fix Singapore’s spaces in a teleological capitalist matrix, regulating how they are experienced and consumed. Singaporean writers such as Alfian Sa’at have recently attempted to conceive of the city beyond the ever intensifying spectacle of pragmatic capitalism. Their work experiments with alternative ways of imagining and inhabiting the city through unconventional literary forms and focalizations. This article looks specifically at Alfian’s “flash fictions” Malay Sketches (2013) – very brief short stories that depict minority Malay life in Singapore. The reading foregrounds the agency of the fictional in the production of social space in the city, and the way it runs counter to the planned and overdetermined spaces of the Singapore state. Close readings, drawing on spatial theory, demonstrate how this dissident text resists the blueprint of Singapore as global capitalist success by reclaiming the affective, the indeterminate and the unquantifiable.