scholarly journals Contemporary Literature from Singapore

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weihsin Gui
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Graphic Novels ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Literary Anthologies

Literature in Singapore is written in the country’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. The various literatures flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of print culture in the British colony, but after independence in 1965, English became emphasized in both the education system and society at large as part of the new government’s attempts to modernize the country. Chinese, Malay, and Tamil were seen as mother tongue languages to provide Singaporeans with cultural ballast while English was regarded as a language for administration, business, and scientific and technological development. Correspondingly, literatures in other languages than English reached a plateau in terms of writerly output and readership during the 1970s and 1980s. However, since 1999, with the state’s implementation of the Renaissance City Plan to revitalize arts and culture in Singapore, there have been various initiatives to increase the visibility of contemporary Singaporean writing both within the country itself and on an international scale. Translation plays a key role in bridging the linguistic and literary divides wrought by the state’s mother tongue policies, with several works by Cultural Medallion winners in different languages translated into English, which remains at present the shared language in Singapore. Literary anthologies are also invaluable forms through which the concepts of a national literature and national identity are expressed and negotiated. A number of anthologies involving Singaporean authors and those from other countries also highlight the growing international presence of and interest in Singaporean literature. Several anthologies also focus on the topic of urban space, city life, and the rapid transformation of Singapore’s physical environment. Writings about gender and sexuality have also become more prominent in single-author collections or edited anthologies, with writers exploring various inventive and experimental narrative forms. A number of poets and writers are also established playwrights, and theater has historically been and continues to be an extremely vital form of creative expression and cultural production. Graphic novels, crime and noir fiction, and speculative and science fiction publications are also on the rise, with the awarding of the Singapore Literature Prize to Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye signaling that these genres merit serious literary consideration. A number of literary publications and materials related to Singaporean literature can be found on the Internet, such as the journal Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the website Singapore Poetry, and the database Poetry.sg. Various nonprofit organizations are also working toward increasing public awareness about literature through events such as Singapore Poetry Writing Month, the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition, the Singapore Writers Festival and National Poetry Festival, and also through projects that exhibit poetry in train stations and on public thoroughfares.

Green Criminology, Culture, and Cinema

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill McClanahan ◽  
Avi Brisman ◽  
Nigel South
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Green Criminology ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Essential Information ◽  
Popular Cinema

Since first proposed by Brisman and South, green cultural criminology has sought to interrogate human-environment interactions in order to locate meaning. Within the broad framework of green cultural criminology, work has emerged that follows visual criminology in looking to the visual cultural register for insights into the intersections of crime, harm, justice, culture and the natural environment. This article turns the green cultural criminological gaze towards motion pictures, by considering how cinema can serve as a central and essential site of the cultural production and communication of knowledge and meaning(s) that inform human interactions with the natural environment. Indeed, environmental crimes, harms, and disasters are constructed and imagined and represented in cinema, and the films discussed in this article illustrate the ways in which the environment-culture connection in the contemporary cinematic mediascape has influenced public discourses concerning environmental change and harm. This article begins by examining the capacity of documentary film to raise public awareness and generate shifts in public consciousness about environmental harms. From here, it explores cinematic science fiction representations of apocalyptic climate disaster, noting the power of the medium in communicating contemporary anxieties surrounding climate change. Finally, filmic communications of a central category of interest for green cultural criminology—resistance to environmental harm—are described, in addition to the various ways that resistance by environmentalists has recently been represented in popular cinema. The films discussed throughout—including An Inconvenient Truth, Cowspiracy, The East, If A Tree Falls, Night Moves, and Snowpiercer—are not an exhaustive sampling of contemporary representations of environmental issues in cinema. Rather, they represent the most salient—and are among the most popular—moments of contemporary cinematic engagement with the nexus of environmental harm and culture. This article concludes by contending that a green cultural criminology should continue to look to the visual register because sites of cultural production often overlooked by criminology (e.g., cinema, literature) can reveal significant and essential information about the moments in which environmental harm, justice, and culture intersect and collide.

Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City

This edited volume provides a multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China with a focus on unseen representations and urban interventions brought about by the transformations of the urban space and the various problems associated with it. Through a wide range of illuminating case studies, the authors demonstrate how innovative artistic and creative practices initiated by various stakeholders not only raise critical awareness on socio-political issues of Chinese urbanization but also actively reshape the urban living spaces. The formation of new collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites facilitate diverse forms of cultural activism as they challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in and of the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question current values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups.

scholarly journals ‘What Difference does it Make? Women's Pop Cultural Production and Consumption in Manchester’

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Richards ◽  
Katie Milestone
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Cultural Industries ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Gender Characteristics ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
The City ◽  
Experiences Of Women

This paper explores the experiences of women in small cultural businesses and is based upon interviews with women working in a range of contexts in Manchester's popular music sector. The research seeks to promote wider consideration of women's roles in cultural production and consumption. We argue that it is necessary that experiences of production and consumption be understood as inter-related processes. Each part of this process is imbued with particular gender characteristics that can serve to reinforce existing patterns and hierarchies. We explore the ways in which female leisure and consumption patterns have been marginalised and how this in turn shapes cultural production. This process influences career choices but it is also reinforced through the integration of consumption into the cultural workplace. Practices often associated with the sector, such as the blurring of work and leisure and ‘networking’, appear to be understood and operated in significantly different ways by women. As cultural industries such as popular music are predicated upon the colonisation of urban space we explore the use of the city and the particular character of Manchester's music scene. We conclude that, despite the existence of highly contingent and individualised identities, significant gender power relations remain evident. These are particularly clear in discussion of the performative and sexualised aspects of the job.

“In search of our better selves”: Totem Transfer Narratives and Indigenous Futurities

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dallas Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Self ◽  
Intergenerational Transfer ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Sustainable Futures

Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller's film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of yesteryear and the Australian “outback”—spaces coded as menacing in their resistance to being tamed by settler-colonial interests. This article charts how Miller's film, while preoccupied with issues pertaining to global warming and ecological collapse, replicates and reifies settler replacement narratives, or what Canadian literature scholar Margery Fee has referred to as “totem transfer” narratives (1987). In these narratives, ultimately the “natives” transfer their knowledges and then disappear from view, helping white settlers remedy the self-created ills that currently threaten their worlds and enabling them to inherit the land. In the second half, I also consider how Indigenous futurist texts offer decolonizing potentials that refute the replacement narratives that persist in settler-colonial contexts. In particular, I examine how Indigenous cultural production emphasizes the importance of the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledges and refuses the hermeneutic of reconciliation that seeks to discipline Indigenous futures in the service of a settler-colonial present.

scholarly journals Staying Alive: Science Fiction in the Age of the Anthropocene — Philip K. Dick’s Pessimistic Humanism

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tallulah Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Scientific Advancement ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

In recent years, literary studies have become increasingly invested in environmentalism. As science reveals the negative impacts of climate change, and demonstrates a growing concern for humanity’s contribution, literature operates as a form of cultural documentation. It details public awareness and anxieties, and acts as a conduit for change by urging empathetic responses and rendering ecological controversy accessible.To explore the relationship between literature and environmental politics, this paper will focus on the work of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and his dystopian visions. In his particular brand of sci-fi, there is no future for humanity. Science and technology fail to pave the way for a better and fairer society, but rather towards, as far as Dick is concerned, extinction. He argues that scientific advancement distances us from reality and from a sense of “humanness”. His pessimistic futures are nihilistic but tender; nurturing a love for humanity even in, what he considers to be, its final hours.Unlike the work of other prominent sci-fi writers, Dick’s fiction does not look towards the stars, but is in many ways a return to earth. The barren landscapes of Mars and other planets offer no comfort, and the evolution of the human into cyborgs, androids and post human species is depicted as dangerous and regressive. Dick’s apocalyptic visions ground his readers in the reality around them, acting in the present for the sake of the earth and humanity’s survival. His humanism is critical of grand enlightenment ideas of “progressivism”, and instead celebrates ordinariness. In the shadow of corporate capitalism and violent dictatorial governments, Dick prefers the little man, the ordinary everyday domestic hero for his narratives. His fiction urges us to take responsibility for our actions, and prepares us for the future through scepticism and pessimism, and a relentless fondness for the human.

scholarly journals Counterfactuality as a Polyphonic Assemblage. Entangled Human and Nonhuman Stories of Early Modern Sciences in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-121
Author(s):  
Mateusz Chaberski
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Neal Stephenson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Point Of Departure

Summary In recent science-fiction literature, we can witness a proliferation of new counterfactual narratives which take the 17th century as their point of departure. Unlike steampunk narratives, however, their aim is not to criticise the socio-political effects caused by contemporary technological development. Such authors as Neal Stephenson or Ian Tregillis, among others, are interested in revisiting the model of development in Western societies, routing around the logic of progress. Moreover, they demonstrate that modernity is but an effect of manifold contingent and indeterminate encounters of humans and nonhumans and their distinct temporalities. Even the slightest modification of their ways of being could have changed Western societies and cultures. Thus, they necessitate a rather non-anthropocentric model of counterfactuality which is not tantamount to the traditional alternative histories which depart from official narratives of the past. By drawing on contemporary multispecies ethnography, I put forward a new understanding of counter-factuality which aims to reveal multiple entangled human and nonhuman stories already embedded in the seemingly unified history of the West. In this context, the concept of “polyphonic assemblage” (Lowenhaupt-Tsing) is employed to conceptualize the contingent and open-ended encounters of human and nonhuman historical actors which cut across different discourses and practices. I analyse Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle to show the entangled stories of humans and nonhumans in 17th century sciences, hardly present in traditional historiographies. In particular, Stephenson’s depiction of quicksilver and coffeehouse as nonhuman historical actors is scrutinized to show their vital role in the production of knowledge at the dawn of modernity.

scholarly journals “Whose Fault Is It?” How Rural Chinese Women Explain Intimate Partner Violence: A Qualitative Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fengsu Hou ◽  
Catherine Cerulli ◽  
Marsha N. Wittink ◽  
Eric D. Caine ◽  
Peiyuan Qiu
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Partner Violence ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Ecological Model ◽  
Migrant Worker ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
The Social

Women are often the victims of intimate partner violence (IPV). Though China has established its first statute against domestic violence, the service developments for victims fall behind. It is important to assess community members' perceptions of what causes IPV to create interventions to prevent and address IPV. This study completed the Short Explanatory Model Interview (SEMI) among a subset sample from a large epidemiology study in rural Sichuan China. The social ecological model was applied to analyze qualitative interviews. Among 339 participants, the average age was 46.01 ± 12.42 years old. There were 31.86% of them had been educated, 14.75% of them had migrant worker partners, and 49.26% of them had experienced violence from their partners in the last year. There were 252 participants attributed IPV to individual factors, and they primarily discussed the social characteristics, behaviors, personalities or even health problems of the husband or the wife in the vignette. Under this theme, there were 86 participants blaming the victim for being anxious, social disconnectedness or lazy; and there were 166 participants blaming to the perpetrator being abusive, irresponsibility, lack of understanding, and cheating. There were 44 women believed the cause was relational, in which there were 41 participants attributed the problem to the broken relationship between the couple and three participants attributed to the lack of support. There were 28 participants believed the cause was communal and societal, such as being poor, family problems, fate, and believed IPV was a common scene. There were 15 participants could not identify the cause of IPV. These participants usually provided very brief responses and barely had insight on violent behaviors or confidence in discussing the cause. Our findings offer a direction for understanding the rural Chinese women's beliefs about the etiology of IPV to better develop interventions which must consider raising a public awareness campaign about the risk factors of IPV and focus on reducing self-blame among victims.

scholarly journals The City in the Age of Remix

Media-N ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Nazmeeva
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Spatial Production ◽  
The Social ◽  
Space Dynamics ◽  
Web Social

As a method of cultural production and communication, remix has permeated the way the social space is perceived, conceived of and lived. Physical social space is captured, constructed and mediated with digital tools and by a multitude of users. The explosive use of cultural software and social media is actively shaping the experience of architectural and urban space. Smart city movement proponents advocate for a kind of participatory decision-making in cities that is akin to digital social space dynamics. Within the architectural practice, the space is first produced as a digital remix. The social space, both online or offline, physical or digital, crowdsourced or expert-designed, is socially produced as a collective assemblage of the fragments of digital images.  This essay aims to outline four trajectories by which physical (architectural and urban) social space is intertwined and remixed with digital (social media and the web) social space, and the broader implications of such cross-hatchings. Additionally, this paper aims to bring this term to architectural and urban discourse. Positing that remix has become the dominant model of spatial production in the contemporary world, what are the implications of it for the social space and for the public? 

scholarly journals Da Zona enquanto espaço pregnante

Revista Prumo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 124-137
Author(s):  
Lucas Gadelha Parente
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Multiple Networks ◽  
Soviet Science Fiction

The present article results from research around the concept of Zone in what refers to a boundary, symbolic and urban space that activates multiple networks of meaning according to its use in social history, literature, cinema, urbanism and theory of art. Secondly, the text deals with the stalker as a character who traces the paths of the Zone. The article analyzes its emergence in Soviet science fiction, in modern cinema, and its unfolding in theoretical discussions, relating both to cyberspace and to a number of contemporary pedestrian practices. Key-Words: cyberspace; misery belt; science fiction; urbanism.

Developing Marketing Strategy on Social Networks

2018 ◽  
pp. 66-82
Author(s):  
Boris Milović
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Nonprofit Organizations ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Winning Strategy ◽  
Marketing Performance ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Training

Social networks have proven to be very convenient and effective medium for the spreading of marketing messages, advertising, branding and promotion of products and services. Social networks offer companies, nonprofit organizations, political parties etc. sending certain messages for free. In addition, they allow companies access to a wide range of characteristics of their users. Developing appropriate, the winning strategy for marketing in social media is a comprehensive, time-intensive process therefore it is important to know to manage their content. Social networks transform certain classical approaches to marketing. They provide creative and relatively easy way to increase public awareness of the company and its products, and facilitate obtaining feedback and decision making. These are sources of different information about users and groups that they've joined. The success itself of marketing performance on a social network depends on the readiness and training of organizations to perform on them.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document