S182. CANCELLED: The Master's Tools: Singaporean Novelists on Writing in the Colonizer's Language

Status: Not Accepted

Room 006D, Henry B. González Convention Center, River Level
Saturday, March 7, 2020
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm

 

Singapore has a rich history of literature in Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and other Asian languages; English-language literary production began to flourish after independence in the 1960s, and has since come to dominate the scene. Yet as in other postcolonial states, anglophone Singaporean writers cannot ignore the politics inherent in their elevation, especially as other language communities grow more marginalized. How far is it possible to reclaim the language of one's colonizer, and at what cost?


Participants

Moderator:

Rachel Heng is the author of the novel Suicide Club. Her short fiction has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and Prairie Schooner's Jane Geske Award and has appeared in Glimmer Train, McSweeney's Quarterly, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is a fiction fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.

Jeremy Tiang has translated more than 20 books from Chinese—most recently Lo Yi-Chin's Far Away. He also writes and translates plays. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize. He is the managing editor of Pathlight and a member of translation collective Cedilla & Co.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow won the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize 2019 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is also the co-author of the nonfiction title Singapore: A Biography and coeditor of In Transit: An Anthology from Singapore on Airports and Air Travel.

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February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center