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Short Stories from the Straits Chinese Magazine

Readings

• Stories from the Straits Chinese Magazine
  Please read all the stories, including my introduction, if you haven't read it the previous week. Print out the following for discussion:
  • "Lost and Found"
  • "From My Father's Diary"
  • "The Travels of Chang Ching Chong"
  • "Rodney's Salvation"
  • "The President's Ball"
• Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda." Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Ed. Cooper and Stoler. Berkeley: U of California P, 1-56. [COURSE PACKET]

I have also included the folowing optional reading in the packet from a previous iteration of the module: feel free to browse if you are interested in gender issues under colonialism:

• Partha Chatterjee, "Whose Imagined Community?" The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 3-13. [optional reading]
• Partha Chatterjee, "Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonialized Women: The Contest in India" American Ethnologist, 16. (Feb 1989): 622-33. [optional reading]

What to Look for in Reading

This will be the second of two weeks in which we will look at the beginnings of English-language Literature in Singapore. We'll be looking at how local elite culture in the pages of the Straits Chinese Magazine is expresed through literature, here in a number of stories by the Straits Chinese. My own introduction will give some examples of how one might read these texts, but make sure you go beyond my readings: as graduate students, you're critically mature enough to do other readings in parallel to my own or, alternatively, challenge some of the assumptions that my readings make. Try to appreciate the stories themselves first of all as works of fiction, and then to think about how some of the issues we have discussed regarding the production of an autonomous culture under colonialism develop in them. Ideally, you should be able to begin to make connections between the literary elements of the texts and their purchase upon these issues.

The article by Stoler and Copper represents part of a "revisionist" movement in colonial discourse analysis from the mid 1990s onwards. Rather than emphasizing binarisms, as Said does, such writing emphasizes that colonial cultuture was complexly structured in terms of power.

Preparatory Questions

Post a 100-200 word reply to any ONE of the following questions to our IVLE bulletin board by 10 p.m. the day before our class meeting. Make sure you print out a copy of your response and bring it to class for discussion.

1. Choose any one of the stories which I have asked you to print out for discussion. Does anything in it resonate with any one of the concepts or issues raised in the Cooper and Stoler article? Be as specific as possible here, locating specific passages and literary techniques which respond to the issue.

2. Up to now, we've largely thought of the Straits Chinese Magazine as the product of a Straits-born non-European elite. You'll notice that some of the stories appear to have been written by Europeans or Eurasians. Would this modify your assessment of the place of the short stories within colonial culture?

3. Do you think that the stories are successful or unsuccessful in creating a distinctively "Straits born" cultural or literary space? Justify your decision.

4. Do the stories from the Straits Chinese Magazine represent a vital component of or only a curious footnote in a Singapore literary tradition?

5. Are there any elements of the Stoler and Cooper Article which you feel need further discussion, clarification, or critique?

Last updated: 29 December, 2003