Iridescent Corners

Abstract

Starting in the 1970s, flash fiction developed into an outsized literary practice relative to other Sinophone forms in Singapore. Flash fiction's smallness and brevity cohere with the fast pace of urban Singaporean life and transformation of its cityscape, the compartmentalized relationship between the nation's four official languages, the marginality of literary spaces and challenges to maintaining literature as a profession, and Southeast Asia's relative obscurity as a world literary center (with Singapore as a small but important connective hub). Taking Yeng Pway Ngon's fleeting scene of Speakers' Corner (a flash platform of “gestural politics”) as a point of departure, this article charts a short history of Sinophone flash and its relationship to literary community building in Singapore through integrative readings of representative works by Jun Yinglü, Ai Yu, Wong Meng Voon, Xi Ni Er, and Wu Yeow Chong, recognizing their formal and thematic intersections not as “big ideas in tiny spaces” but as iridescent corners that traverse the state's cultural, political, and geographical out-of-bounds (OB) markers. Rather than privileging professional mastery, their works trace flash fiction's iridescent literariness and worldliness to hyperlocality (the physical and literary “corners” they illuminate), compressed temporality, a participatory culture of authorship, and a spirit of amateurism. This amateurism is derived not from a sense of linguistic underdevelopment or technical lack among these authors, but from their passionate and vulnerable engagement with the flash form, as well as the dissident moral conscience of their thematically and stylistically intersecting critiques of Singapore's sociopolitical OB markers.