new directions in singapore studies
Posted in 10 so what on Sep 23rd, 2011
Philip Holden Review of Robert Yeo, Routes: A Singaporean Memoir, 1940-75, Singapore: Ethos Book, 2011, 384 pages. Robert Yeo’s Routes: A Singaporean Memoir 1940-1975 doesn’t at first seem like a memoir at all. The book consists of photographs, prose vignettes, fully transcribed letters, documents such as school reports, and long quotations from sources as diverse […]
Posted in 9 the arts II on Jun 19th, 2011
John Low The legitimacy, rationality, psychology, technical expertise, training, education and history of the artist-person; in effect, everything that marks him out as an individual professional with a right to his own stakes and claims in society is, with one fell swoop, cast off on to the rubbish heap of irrelevance. Is it really any […]
Posted in 8 intellectuals on Dec 23rd, 2010
Chiu Weili The ‘Modernist’ poetry movement started in Singapore in the late 1950s, with key figures such as Chen Ruixian, Du Nanfa etc. Initially viewed as an off-shoot of its Taiwanese counterpart, it soon became an indigenous literary campaign, extending its reach as far as Malaysia. It is distinctive in its particular emphasis on aesthetics […]
Posted in 3 commemoration on Jun 16th, 2009
CN Chen It is usual not to expect too much of a glossy and beautifully bound book destined to decorate the top of a coffee table but the National University of Singapore centennial celebration publication Imagination, Openness and Courage was an exception. Its lead article was a masterly dissertation by Professor Wang Gungwu on the […]
Posted in 3 commemoration on Mar 25th, 2009
Daniel PS Goh I wrote this piece for my now-defunct blog a year ago, almost to the day, on a sleepless night when time was suspended by the eternal flight of introspection. I was going through the week’s newspapers trying to write a regular column for another blog but got stopped in my tracks by […]
Posted in 2 archives & memory II on Feb 26th, 2008
Robert Yeo Wang: I might start at the beginning. I’m not one of those schoolboy poets who wrote and published while still at school. When we arrived the very first month of the foundation of the University of Malaya in October 1949. it was a very exciting time for all of us. There was a […]
Posted in 2 archives & memory II on Feb 26th, 2008
Wang Gungwu Text of the public lecture given on 8 July 2007 in conjunction with the official opening of the National University of Singapore Bukit Timah Campus. A new University of Malaya was founded in 1949 in the shadow of the Malayan emergency and the communist victory in China. For the next decade, there was […]
Posted in 2 archives & memory on Jan 10th, 2008
Philip Holden Wang Gungwu is best known as a historian of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and for a stellar academic career commencing at the University of Malaya in Singapore and culminating in periods as Vice Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, and Director of the East Asia Institute, National University of Singapore. […]
Posted in 2 archives & memory on Jan 10th, 2008
Wang Gungwu The Singapore Heritage Society presented a public talk by Professor Wang Gungwu, then Director of the East Asia Institute, on 10 April 2006 at the National Library, entitled “Learning Me Your Language”. Professor Wang discussed the politics of decolonization and English language writing in Singapore/Malaya in the early 1950s, a period when he […]
Posted in 2 archives & memory on Jan 10th, 2008
Wang Gungwu From The Malayan Undergrad, Vol 9 No 5 July 1958 When I was a schoolboy a little more than ten years ago, no one talked of such a thing as Malayan poetry. It was not even known if there was any poetry written by people who lived in Malaya.
