Postcolonial and cosmopolitan connections: teaching Anglophone Singapore literature for nation and world

ABSTRACT

This article argues for the importance and relevance of postcolonial studies in achieving the goal of cosmopolitanism through Literature education. Having significantly redrawn the overall contours of literary study in the twentieth century, postcolonial studies as an interdisciplinary critical tradition provides us with a conceptual vocabulary, analytical lens and interpretive protocols with which to interrogate rigorously many salient aspects of contemporary globalization in our world today. There are at least three main areas where postcolonialism’s contribution remains vital: i) in critical discussion about the nation and nationalism, ii) in countering Eurocentrism, and iii) in the examination of form, style and literary poetics or aesthetics. In this article, I explore each of these areas first before suggesting ways in which Anglophone Singapore literature may be taught and read through these critical emphases, with the ultimate goal of answering nation-centred goals while also fulfiling the national curriculum’s desired outcome of growing empathetic and global thinkers.

KEYWORDS:

• postcolonialism
• cosmopolitanism
• Singapore literature
• literature education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The decision by the Singapore government to adopt a bilingual policy with English as the first and working language for a polyglot multiracial country in 1966 when only a minority of the population spoke the language at that time has had far-reaching consequences. As of 2010, 79.9% of the population have adopted English as a language of use compared to 21% of the population before independence, thus making English the indisputable lingua franca of the nation (Alsagoff, 2012, p. 150).

2. To appreciate how texts in other languages offer us a perspective denied the Anglophone reader limited by monolingualism or a lack of sufficient competency in another language other than English, we need only consider how differently the nation and the past can look in these texts (see Poon, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angelia Poon

Angelia Poon is Associate Professor of English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests include postcolonial studies and contemporary Anglophone writing with a focus on globalization and transnationalism. Besides other books and journal articles on postcolonial and Singapore literature, she has co-edited Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature (NUS Press, 2009) and Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts (Routledge, 2017).