The regional turn to modernist studies in Singapore

Abstract

The past decade or so saw a regional turn to modernist studies in Singapore. Numerous projects are mapping out the networks of institutions, artists, and writers that disseminated and reinvented Euro-American modernism in Southeast Asia from the 1930s. While this networked approach enables the recovery of neglected modernists in the non-West, particularly women, it is also too neatly aligned with Singapore's self-branding as a global city and its ongoing accumulation of cultural capital. Related scholarship is circumscribed by a tension between a desire to diversify modernist studies and a narrow fixation on connecting Singapore-based artists and writers to already established modernist networks. In the process, an implicit conception of modernity and modernism that privileges connectivity, mobility, and capital is installed. Consequently, inconvenient facets of regional art and literature, as well as intra-regional connections, are overlooked. I examine how these dynamics play out in projects on the Nanyang artists and writers, a group of diasporic Chinese literati who worked in Southeast Asia following their exposure to Euro-American modernism. In closing, I turn to emergent avenues of research which counteract the nationalist slant to the study of regional modernisms in Singapore.