Peripherality and nostalgia in Singapore island fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Singapore’s celebrated economic development during the post-independence period involved the wholesale reshaping of Singapore’s landscape. This had well-documented effects upon Singaporean cultural imaginaries and public history. The transformation of Singapore’s rivers and peripheral islands, however, is rarely cited in the national narrative. Many of Singapore’s peripheral islands were repurposed during the development drive, as islanders were relocated to the main island and supplanted by oil refineries, tourism attractions, and landfill. Commemoration of this history of resettlement is scant, and the islands remain peripheral and relatively inaccessible to most Singaporeans. This article draws on Vyjayanthi Rao’s conceptualisation of the “city-as-archive” in tandem with Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s “tidalectics” to put forward a method of reading literature for its fluid construction of historical meaning in relation to places. By positioning Singapore’s islands and rivers in world-historical processes, it explores representations of living cultures and cultural memory to show how the bounded places of the southern islands and Seletar Reservoir act as repositories for cultural memory and practice. Through analysis of Isa Kamari’s novel Rawa and Suratman Markasan’s novel Penghulu, this article foregrounds these peripheries, illustrating how cultural histories are brought to the fore as living and dynamic, rather than merely preserved.