Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand


CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER

 

Mr. Wah Guan LIM                                                             (Cornell University)
email: <wl394@cornell.edu>

"Singapore: A Nation of Dreams or Dreams Unfulfilled? 
Probing the Singapore Dream in Singapore Dreaming."

Can Singapore, a city-state famed for its cleanliness, bureaucratic efficiency, high economic growth and political stability on the one hand, and ruled with an iron hand so tight that it imposes “restrictions on individual rights, ranging from freedom of speech to the freedom to purchase chewing gum at the corner shop” (Cherian George 2000, 170) on the other, be a city of dreams?  Is there room for dreaming in a country whose state influence is so pervasive and thorough that it even dictates what the optimum number of offspring every Singaporean couple should produce?  By presenting the other side of the Singapore Success Story, Singapore Dreaming offers us a glance at how an average Chinese Singaporean family struggles to acquire upward social mobility, and the price it has to pay for “success.”  Challenging the state’s model as the only conceivable one for a comfortable life in Singapore, the film enacts its resistance performance against the status quo by presenting us with several alternative ways of imagining the average Singaporean’s dream into being.  At the same time, it posits the fundamental question: by whose standard of success and happiness are we measuring ourselves to?  My reading of the film is that it beckons us to the irony of what we have lost in this pursuit of our dreams: is this more like what Glenn Albrecht terms “Solastalgia” –– we experiencing a sense of nostalgia for home even though we have never left it because “home” has changed so much –– or have we lost ourselves so completely in this endless material pursuit such that we have to put up a “façade of success” to fool everyone, including ourselves?

Wah Guan Lim is a PhD candidate in the field of East Asian Literature at Cornell University.  His research focuses on Contemporary Sinophone Theatre, in particular the manifestation of "Chineseness" in the dramatic work of four director-playwrights in the Chinese diaspora: Gao Xingjian (dissident), Stan Lai (Taiwan), Danny Yung (Hong Kong) and Kuo Pao Kun (Singapore).