{"title":"Emulative Versus Revisionist Occidentalism: Monetary and Other Values in Recent Singaporean Fiction","authors":"T. Wagner","doi":"10.1177/0021989404044737","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Towards the end of Rex Shelley’s A River of Roses (1998), the ageing heroines discuss cross-cultural love affairs in 1966. As part of Singapore’s Eurasian community, they have inherited a legacy of intermarriages and, in the turmoil of the war, they have engaged in further dalliances across cultures. Yet, as they critically view the new opportunities and problems that the next generation has to face, they find that their discussion of ethnicity, culture and racial hybridity boils down to one thing: money and, with it, the newly forming class-divide that is premised on capital alone. Monetary accomplishments have led to the submergence of issues of religion and race. This is not to say that money did not play a vital role in earlier fictions of the region. The centrality of commerce had indeed informed fictions of the British Straits Settlements – now Singapore and parts of Malaysia – ever since East India Company employees produced both fiction and non-fictional writing about the region that was emphatically inflected by a mixture of exotic Orientalism and late-eighteenth-century economic theories to generate a pervasive Romantic commercialism. The most intriguing shift in recent representations, however, is a new awareness of the power that money and, by implication, the class-division based on money, holds in the Straits’ past and present fictions. The comparison of crosscultural relationships in A River of Roses demonstrates this growing emphasis on monetary values rather than on cultural or racial hybridity:","PeriodicalId":44714,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2004-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0021989404044737","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989404044737","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, AFRICAN, AUSTRALIAN, CANADIAN","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
Towards the end of Rex Shelley’s A River of Roses (1998), the ageing heroines discuss cross-cultural love affairs in 1966. As part of Singapore’s Eurasian community, they have inherited a legacy of intermarriages and, in the turmoil of the war, they have engaged in further dalliances across cultures. Yet, as they critically view the new opportunities and problems that the next generation has to face, they find that their discussion of ethnicity, culture and racial hybridity boils down to one thing: money and, with it, the newly forming class-divide that is premised on capital alone. Monetary accomplishments have led to the submergence of issues of religion and race. This is not to say that money did not play a vital role in earlier fictions of the region. The centrality of commerce had indeed informed fictions of the British Straits Settlements – now Singapore and parts of Malaysia – ever since East India Company employees produced both fiction and non-fictional writing about the region that was emphatically inflected by a mixture of exotic Orientalism and late-eighteenth-century economic theories to generate a pervasive Romantic commercialism. The most intriguing shift in recent representations, however, is a new awareness of the power that money and, by implication, the class-division based on money, holds in the Straits’ past and present fictions. The comparison of crosscultural relationships in A River of Roses demonstrates this growing emphasis on monetary values rather than on cultural or racial hybridity:
在雷克斯·雪莱(Rex Shelley)的《玫瑰河》(A River of Roses, 1998)的结尾,两位上了年纪的女主人公讨论了1966年的跨文化爱情。作为新加坡欧亚社区的一部分,他们继承了异族通婚的遗产,在战争的动荡中,他们进一步参与了跨文化的调情。然而,当他们批判性地看待下一代必须面对的新机遇和问题时,他们发现,他们对种族、文化和种族混杂的讨论归结为一件事:金钱,以及随之而来的、以资本为前提的新形成的阶级鸿沟。货币方面的成就使宗教和种族问题被淹没。这并不是说金钱在该地区早期的小说中没有发挥至关重要的作用。自从东印度公司的雇员创作了关于英属海峡殖民地(现在的新加坡和马来西亚的部分地区)的小说和非小说作品以来,商业的中心地位确实为小说提供了素材。东印度公司的员工创作了关于该地区的小说和非小说作品,这些作品受到了异国情调的东方主义和18世纪晚期经济理论的强烈影响,产生了一种无处不在的浪漫商业主义。然而,在最近的表现中,最有趣的变化是,人们开始意识到,在海峡两岸过去和现在的小说中,金钱以及由此隐含的以金钱为基础的阶级划分所具有的力量。《玫瑰河》中对跨文化关系的比较表明,越来越多的人强调金钱价值,而不是文化或种族混杂:
期刊介绍:
"The Journal of Commonwealth Literature has long established itself as an invaluable resource and guide for scholars in the overlapping fields of commonwealth Literature, Postcolonial Literature and New Literatures in English. The journal is an institution, a household word and, most of all, a living, working companion." Edward Baugh The Journal of Commonwealth Literature is internationally recognized as the leading critical and bibliographic forum in the field of Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures. It provides an essential, peer-reveiwed, reference tool for scholars, researchers, and information scientists. Three of the four issues each year bring together the latest critical comment on all aspects of ‘Commonwealth’ and postcolonial literature and related areas, such as postcolonial theory, translation studies, and colonial discourse. The fourth issue provides a comprehensive bibliography of publications in the field