Transmodern by Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U.

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019

CONTENTS Preface Prof. Nicole Huang

Anticolonial Presentism Dr. J. Daniel Elam

I Sing the City Electric: Modern Singapore Envisioned in Popular Malay Music Faris Joraimi

Film Review: The Karrabing Film Collective Alicia Oanh Le

Reading List: Varieties of Modernity Marcus Yee

Vignettes: Comparative Literature Festival 2019: Transmodern ?現代 Marcus Yee

Credits

TRANSMODERN ?現代

PREFACE Professor Nicole Huang

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 Preface for Bulletin/Transmodern October 2019 The extended community of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong is celebrating the programme’s 30th anniversary this Fall. Also founded in 1989, the Society of Comparative Literature is also celebrating its milestone. In the past three decades, many young comparatists have sustained the community with their passion and talent and witnessed the programme’s transformation from its infancy well into a secured adulthood. The annual Comparative Literature Festival has been a highlight of the Society’s activities over the years. This current issue of Bulletin takes the same theme from the most recent Festival. Originally coined by Argentinian-Mexican philosopher and theologian Enrique Dussel, “transmodernity” was envisioned as a countermeasure against what Dussel perceived as the prevalence of postmodernism. At times dubbed “new modernism,” theories of the “transmodern” emphasize the incompleteness of the modernity project and argue for its renewal in a great range of cultures and contexts. This great range is represented by short essays included in this issue. Daniel Elam revisits the travels of the Gita, in time (from the fifth century BCE to the twentieth century) and in space (from South Asia to global reception and popularity). Faris Joraimi identifies cosmopolitan roots of modern Singapore in Malay popular music from the 1930s and 40s to highlight a forgotten “modern” moment. Marcus Yee’s reading list is a further reminder of modernity’s many lives and manifestations. Readers are encouraged to vigorously engage the mixed legacies of modernity, to pay close attention to the continuing fragmentation of group identities in current geopolitical situations, and to draw our critical attention to intersectionality. 5

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As with past issues of Bulletin, this current issue underscores the need to reactivate old and new concepts so that they speak to the ethos of our time. This continues the Society’s efforts at channeling youthful energy and creativity into important issues concerning all of us today. I urge you to read on. Professor Nicole Huang Chairperson of the Department of Comparative Literature

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ANTICOLONIAL PRESENTISM Dr. J. Daniel Elam

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 In the 1920s, an incredibly popular new text was taking the world by storm. When read aloud to crowds, riots ensued. Leftist groups circulated copies of it, sometimes illicitly, and met in clandestine settings to discuss it. By the late 1930s, it had profound global political effects, including threatening to topple a fairly stable government and replace it with something entirely new. It was, as one might have guessed, the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita was written, according to most scholarship, around the fifth century BCE. 700 verses in Sanskrit written in a fairly accessible style. It has circulated in South Asia popularly since then. In the nineteenth century, in a long steady move to ‘protestantise’ South Asian religious practice by British scholars, the Gita became analogous to ‘scripture’, joining the ranks of the Vedas, the Book of Manu, and other early Sanskrit texts, as ‘the Hindu Bible’.1 But the Gita became the Gita – at least as we know it now – in the 1920s, when it emerged as an idiosyncratic Gujarati interpretation by M.K. Gandhi. The theological-political 1930 Gita was profoundly popular across the world, and offered a new, transcendentally inspired anticolonial politics in the face of the British Raj. Gandhi’s counterintuitive reading – that a dialogue urging a warrior to fight should be the philosophical grounding for a practice of nonviolence – has overshadowed perhaps more textually defensible interpretations. To be sure, Gandhi had no academic intentions, and so it is unfair to charge him with poor scholarship. But the curious trajectory of the Gita from 700 BC to 1930 CE frustrated many of his opponents (most notably, B.R. Ambedkar, who produced exhaustive histories to dismantle Gandhian Hinduism’s alleged transcendence). We may be See J. Barton Scott, Tomoko Masuzawa

TRANSMODERN ?現代 additionally frustrated by Gandhi’s reliance on a Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation, given that Arnold was an orientalist philologist in service of the British Empire. Gandhi’s invention of ‘tradition’ was particularly useful for anticolonial action in the present, but Gandhi charted its path through rather murky terrain. But Gandhi was hardly alone in his uses and abuses of history for the living present. Gandhi’s recuperation of ‘Hindu tradition’ seems at first glance at odds with revolutionary anticolonial activists like Bhagat Singh, who dismissed tradition as the accumulation of authority. Bhagat Singh’s infamous cry, inqilab zindabad, declares revolution for the perpetual present, a never-ending ‘now’, against the authoritative weight of history.2 Nevertheless, the ‘cult of the bomb’, in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army’s 1910 defence, declares violence on the present in order to revive – not avenge – the past. Instead, impatient politics is a constant and consistent demand for revolution – inqilab zindabad – and therefore in line with a total reformulation of an historical imagination. Before Bhagat Singh, Lala Har Dayal revived nineteenth-century liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer for use against the British Empire.3 Bhagat Singh’s extensive reading habits drew on a proliferation of sources, taken out of their historical context, for use in the revolutionary present.4 The scholarly impulse has been to rigorously historicise anticolonial thought. This historicisation has been exhaustive and empirical (sometimes to a fault). At the same time, presentism has been a problem that has dogged the histography of anticolonialism since Indian and Pakistani independence.5 Anticolonial thought, from See Moffat, 2013. CSSAAME. 4 Bioscope, South Asia. 5 See Moffat, 2019. 2 3

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 Gandhi to Bhagat Singh, posits a key problem: to historicise it is to recognise that there were no better presentists than radical anticolonial activists, for whom all of literature and history is up for the taking. To historicise anticolonial thinkers requires us to embrace their presentism. ‘Presentism’ is the name usually given to an historical and literary methodological error: it is an analysis motivated by present concerns rather than an objective analysis of historical conditions. In her 2002 presidential address at the American Historical Association meeting, Lynn Hunt describes presentism as ‘a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation’ that sets the past up for failure under today’s rubrics.6 In response, she offers, a proper historical approach might restore ‘wonder’ to history, not requiring it to predict its future just as we cannot predict ours. But people in the past were attempting to predict the future, and act towards its realization. Those futures might have been utopian, fuzzily imagined, faulty, or horrific – they were likely, more often than not, not ‘correct’ – but a sense of future judgment has frequently justified or motivated action. Presentism is ‘morally complacent and methodologically suspect’, as Wai Chi Dimock has recently written.7 There have also been equally robust defences of presentism, which has been recuperated as the necessary corrective to an encyclopaedic historicism. Its most prominent and vocal advocate has been the V21 Collective, which issued a ‘manifesto’ of theses for the study of Victorian literature in the twenty-first century. The target of the Collective’s critique is ‘positivist historicism’, which does ‘little more than exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past’. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may2002/against-presentism 7 Dimock, Wai Chi. ‘Editor’s Column: Historicism, Presentism, Futurism’, PMLA 133:2 (2018), pp. 257-263. 8 http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/ 6

TRANSMODERN ?現代 The dichotomies that have dogged the field of literary study – most notably, ‘theory’ against ‘history’ – might be undone, the Collective claims, by way of a ‘strategic presentism’.9 Nevertheless, the dismissal of positivist historical description seems as unsatisfactory as its assertion; the ‘strategically presentist’ critic is too authoritative and too self-knowing, but occupies the same aloof, potentially ironic, position that the droll historian does. We might pay closer attention to the curious adjective that has attended to the defence of presentism: ‘strategic’. ‘Strategic presentism’, with its sly nod to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (playful) call for ‘strategic essentialism’, is, in fact, already a future-oriented presentism: a presentism with strategy is one that imagines a success (or at least a consequence) in the future – and thus may be held responsible to a regime of investments and evaluations. Strategic presentism suggests that the values of humanistic inquiry are values to-be-accrued or what might be gained: a pay-off for our critique at some point in a predictable future (in the sense that we assume its values will remain ours). We might imagine a non-strategic presentism: criticism that is experimentally and tentatively world-grasping. Severing our commitment to futurity and reproduction (the logics of heterosexuality and nationstates), this radical presentism does not languish in the easy rejection of an unknowable future, but nor does it act under any assurances or guarantees. This form of radically presentist critique posits an anti-nihilist non-futurity. Aniket Jaaware, in his brilliant reconsideration of caste (and B.R. Ambedkar), posits this as an impossible ‘aporia’. This aporia is marked by the fact that ‘all forms of social action and the ethics supporting them remain caught’ in ‘the danger… of thinking of the future as an inevitable 9

Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh’s co-organised MLA 2018 panel, ‘Strategic Presentism’.

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 continuation of the present and ignoring the radical unknowability of it and in a blithe spirit of continuing only to do what is right from the present point of view or making the future so different as to not know how to reach it’.10 Similarly David Marriot, in his moving analysis of Frantz Fanon’s thought, argues that thinking ‘aporia’ is the only mode of thought conducive to Fanonian psychopolitics, which is ‘to know a thought that is not yet’.11 Fanon is a thinker of the ‘discontinuous present,’ Marriot writes. Fanon theorises world history for the wretched of the earth as ‘for a teleology without telos’ and ‘the tabula rasa does resist any narrative or archaeological schema that would reduce it to a final meaning’.12 A radical anticolonial presentism, in an aporia, is therefore nonstrategic: it is experimentation in the fleeting moment. A vision of a postcolonial future does stand at the centre of most anticolonial thought. But it was a future that many anticolonial thinkers knew they would never inhabit. Anticolonial thought was written in exile, on deathbeds, in abjection, or in the face of ‘declined experience’.13 Anti-imperial thinkers invented aesthetic forms necessary to imagine a worldwide egalitarianism rooted in the unlikelihood of any future at all.14 Necessary because it was impossible, radical anticolonial thought theorised action in the fleeting moment, undetermined by the logics of consequentialism.

Aniket Jaaware 117-118. Marriot 363. 12 Marriot 28-29. 13 Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008), xvi. 14 Futures here are not absent – most of the time, they are actively imagined – but they are non-falsifiable futures: unguaranteed, unsecured, unpredictable. 10 11

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I SING THE CITY ELECTRIC

MODERN SINGAPORE ENVISIONED IN POPULAR MALAY MUSIC Faris Joraimi

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 In the 1961 film Seniman Bujang Lapok, starring Malayan impresario P. Ramlee, the viewer is treated to opening shots that follow the path of a lorry as it wends its way through Singapore town. The camera pans to automobiles plying the Anderson Bridge, and the opulent Fullerton Hotel on the opposite bank of the Singapore River. The sequence that follows is a visual laundry-list of the city’s landmarks: the Victoria Concert Hall with its soaring clocktower, more motorcars, grand Connaught Drive, the Padang, the neoclassical columns of City Hall, the legendary Capitol Theatre on Stamford Road (boasting of the latest film shot “In Technicolor!”) and the Lido on Orchard Road. Seniman Bujang Lapok was shot and produced in Singapore by Shaw Brothers, which later went on to become Hong Kong’s largest cinematic conglomerate. The film is a self-referential commentary on commercial entertainment and its mechanisms of production. It also

The Capitol Theatre between Stamford Road and Hill Street in the 1950s. Built in the Neoclassical style, it opened in 1930 and was regarded as one of Singapore’s finest cinemas. Source: National Archives of Singapore

TRANSMODERN ?現代 celebrates the city. Seniman was made in a time when Singapore - although a predominantly Chinese city - was also the undisputed capital of Malay pop culture. Over the span of about three decades after the Second World War, Singapore’s Malay stars recorded and released hundreds of popular songs. Some of which illustrated what the city was like in the years before independence. One from the 1940s, Uncle Murtabak by M. Yatim, contains interesting mentions from the perspective of a workingclass resident. People shopped at Robinsen Petang (“evening Robinson’s”), a flea market colloquially Long before Singapore’s skyline was dominated by the named after Robinson’s iconic Marina Bay Sands, there was Collyer Quay: an elwaterfront promenade that offered unobstructed Department Store at Raffles egant views of the sea. It was lined with opulent buildings like Place. The titular Uncle takes the Fullerton Hotel and the Alkaff Arcade. A trolley-bus a bone-rattling trolley-bus can be seen turning at a bend. (naik trolley bas berjongkit- Source: National Archives of Singapore jongkit) across town. These are images foreign to Singaporeans today. But they should come as no surprise. By the 1930s, Singapore was one of the richest cities in Asia. It had glittering department stores, an opulent waterfront of hotels, banks and trading houses, and the largest trolley-bus system in the world.1 It was also - as the song demonstrates - very unequal. Being a colonial emporium, Singapore’s wealth was largely held by European elites. Asians largely formed Singapore’s working underclass. The Malays, who are also the indigenous inhabitants of Singapore and its surrounding maritime region, are stereotypically associated with poverty 16

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 and rural habitation. Indeed, urban historian Imran Tajudeen notes how the two typological features of Singapore’s colonial cityscape — the wooden kampong house and the stone shophouse — occupy a racialised binary.2 The former is “exclusively Malay and therefore rural”, while the shophouse is “urban and thereby naturally Chinese”.3 However, there were some who participated in trade and were able to attain no small degree of affluence. Imran finds that the Malay merchants and aristocrats of Singapore too lived in ornate townhouses. These were concentrated in Kampong Gelam, a once-sprawling urban ward located immediately east of the international port around the Singapore River estuary. The world of Kampong Gelam which is today a gazetted historic district - was one of booming commerce and cosmopolitan cultural exchanges. The playback singer Momo Latiff encapsulated this atmosphere in her song, Singapura di Kampong Facade A (top): Townhouse (1900, now demolished) built by fe- Jawa. Kampong Jawa male Malay merchants Haji Khatijah and Haji Fatimah, Sumbawa Street today) Road, Kampong Rochor ward, Kampong Gelam town, Singapore. (Arab was an important node Facade B (bottom right): Chinese clan association building (1928), of business within Jonker Street, Melaka. Kampong Gelam. The Source: Imran Bin Tajudeen, 2013 latter in turn anchored Singapore to the trade networks of the Malay Archipelago, the city’s immediate commercial hinterland. The song extols Kampong Jawa as being terkenal asal pasar di kota (“renowned 17

TRANSMODERN ?現代 city’s first marketplace”), choked by arrivals from all over Malaya and its surrounding islands. This too was a fundamental characteristic of Singapore that its composers and lyricists highlighted, coming as they did from less-populated highlands in West Sumatra or smaller towns on the Malay Peninsula: the throng of the urban masses.

An aerial view of present-day Kampong Gelam, once the premier center of Malay political, intellectual, artistic and commercial life in Singapore. Source: Friends of the Museums Singapore

WHERE THE PEOPLE ARE By 1950, there were 1.02 million people in Singapore, making it the most populous city in Malaya. Saloma, a performer born in Singapore in 1935, released a single entitled Oh Singapura in the late 1950s. In it she repeatedly alludes to the frenetic movement of pedestrians packing its streets and busy thoroughfares at all hours of the day:

Silang siur di jalanraya tidak putusnya berduyun silih berganti

At every junction, without stopping crowds cross, one after the other.

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 The Crowd - as manifested in the daily thousands who traverse Shibuya and Times Square - physically embody the city as a great gathering of human individuals engaged in endeavours that sustain it: commercial, artistic and everything else besides. When Hokusai published his album Fine Views of the Eastern Capital around 1800, Edo was transforming itself into a metropolis. Accordingly, he peopled the burgeoning city with its variegated multitude: courtesans, market-men, samurai, peasants and craftsmen. Baudelaire’s flâneur was introduced just decades later, as an observer of Parisian street-life for whom the crowd was his natural element. Modern Singapore had its own poise distinct from Haussmann’s Paris, but the same electric life of the Crowd permeated its daily rhythms, even then. In the mid-20th century, Elly Srikudus, a singer who recorded duets with fellow Indonesian stars like Sam Saimun and Bing Slamet, also contributed an ode to urban Singapore. Lenggang Singapore (Singapore Swaying) records that the city swarmed with “crowds of every race in Malaya, decked in style” (bergaya ramai segala bangsa di Malaya). But the modern city was a spectacle to be witnessed, as much as its texture of thronging masses had to be felt. Many of these songs seem to be addressed to foreigners, painting a pretty picture of Singapore for the tourist or acquainting new arrivals with its sights. THE CITY AS AN AESTHETIC Lenggang Singapore opens with a direct appeal to the prospective traveller: Kalau tuan berjalan-jalan di Singapura (“if you walk about in Singapore”), before describing its many sensuous marvels, including — oddly enough — the attractive women who occupied its lyricist’s reveries:

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Tapi awas Bung - jangan sampai Bung ‘kan tergoda Lenggang dan lenggok nona manis yang cantik-jelita ‘Shanghai dress’ memikat, bibir merah pekat Pinggang ramping hebat— awas terkebah!

“But beware, brother-- make sure you don’t get tempted, by the swaying and sashaying of those sweet and pretty girls, with their ‘Shanghai dresses’ ensnaring, their red lips thickly painted, their slender waists spectacular. Don’t break into a sweat!” It is unclear whether the (unnamed) lyricist had ever been to Singapore, but the image the city evoked in the region’s popular imagination is apparent: Singapore was ‘sin-city’. Contrasted with the relatively more conservative Malay Peninsula and neighbouring Sumatra, it was where cosmopolitan sensibilities meant a more updated (if perhaps, also, more revealing) fashion sense. Here too, the modern girl found footing in magazines and advertisements that celebrated style and sartorial innovation. Kalau Ke Singapura (If You Go to Singapore), released in 1959, also serves up Singapore as a city of sights for visual consumption. Performed by R. Azmi, it echoes Lenggang Singapore’s premise of an ideal destination for someone if they decide 20

From the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, Singapore had a lively print culture that embraced cutting-edge tastes developing around the world. This Malay fashion magazine printed in Singapore in the 1950s is advertising the latest trend: an updated cut of the kebaya – an attire worn by Malay, Straits Chinese and Eurasian women – now available in Swiss voile. The kebaya soon became emblematic of the modern Malayan girl. Source: Khir Johari

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 to go; the city is a distant prospect waiting to be realised:

Kalau datang ke Singapura Hati tentu merasa riang Melihat Jembatan Merdeka If you come to Singapore Your heart will certainly feel joy When you see the Merdeka Bridge

“Onward Malaysia” – bright lights at a night parade celebrating Singapore’s entry into the Malaysian Federation on 16 September 1963. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew led three shouts of ‘merdeka’ to proclaim the nation’s independence from Britain.

The Merdeka Bridge was opened in 1956. It was named in honour of Malaya’s struggle for independence from British rule (merdeka: Malay for ‘liberty’/‘freedom’), which was won a year later. Singapore became a self-governing territory in 1959, before gaining independence by acceding to the Malaysian Federation in 1963. Such political ideals were reflected in another song by Saloma, Singapura Waktu Malam (Singapore by Night), first released in 1962. It too articulated the aspirations of Singapore’s people to become one nation - united, equal and free - with the rest of Malaya:

Singapura maju jaya Tetap dalam aman dan sentosa Makin hari tambah kaya Source: National Archives of apabila di dalam Malaysia Singapore 21

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Singapore progresses triumphant Ever in peace and tranquility With each day its wealth increases When it is part of Malaysia

This did not last, however. Due to ideological differences and the exacerbation of racialist sentiments on both sides, Singapore was expelled from the Federation in 1965. But the bridge that still spans the Kallang River today remains, an enduring reminder of the dream of a united merdeka that once was. The notable landmark was mentioned again in Oh Singapura:

Cantiknya Singapura, bandar permai sukar cari bandingnya Tak sunyi tiap hari lalu-lintas di Jembatan Merdeka

How lovely Singapore is, a city serene; it’s difficult to find another like it It’s never quiet every day, all that traffic on the Merdeka Bridge

Oh Singapura consistently praises Singapore for being cantik and indah (pretty; beautiful), as well as being quite the tourist magnet:

Dikunjungi para pelancong luar negeri Sebilang waktu dan masa Jalannya memang indah

It’s visited by tourists from abroad At every moment and hour And its avenues are truly beautiful

The notion of the city as an aesthetic experience to be consumed by visitors is reinforced in Singapura Bandaraya (Singapore City), by 22

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 Abdul Rahman. This upbeat extols a picturesque city of bustling activity and splendid panoramas:

Amat indah pandangannya, dengan lampu-lampunya, lalu-lintas dengan hebatnya Singapura bandaraya tuan-tuan kunjungilah untuk tuan bersuka-ria

What a beautiful view to behold, with its lights and spectacular traffic Singapore city - you must come and visit for you to find pleasure

THE CITY BY NIGHT In many of these songs, Singapore gleams. The first building in Singapore to be lit by electric lighting was Istana Tyersall, the palatial residence of Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor, in 1892.4 By 1906, the first electric A typical night at the Great World Amusement street lamps were installed.5 Park, 1962. Naturally, the illumination of streets and buildings Source: National Archives of Singapore after dark thus enabled the creation of a nightlife. None of this was lost on the song-writers. The city Abdul Rahman sings of is fully nocturnal:

Bila hari sudah malam, bintang-bintang mulai terbit Singapura bandaraya cantik 23

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Itu waktu rakyatnya melepaskan lelahnya, Untuk bersiar di tepi pantai

When day turns to night, and the stars come out Singapore’s a beautiful city That’s when its people let go of their weariness And have a stroll along the beach

Arguably, the song that memorialises Singapore’s scenic nightlife most explicitly is Saloma’s Singapura Waktu Malam (Singapore by Night). The city’s fluorescence is a sight to behold: Singapura waktu malam, lampu neon indah berkilauan Gedung tinggi gemerlapan, sungguh megah tiada bandingan

Nights were filled with the sound of cha-cha, rumba, joget and ronggeng at Bunga Tanjong, a Malay dance hall in New World Amusement Park. The singer Momo Latiff is photographed performing here in the 1950s.

Singapore at night, its neon lights gleaming beautifully Soaring buildings radiant, how grand beyond compare Oh Singapura exhorts listeners to contemplate the bright lights enhancing the city’s splendour:

Indahnya Singapura, nama masyhur di seluruh dunia Lihatlah bila malam — cahaya terang serta berwarna-warni Kota ramai aman jaya serta terpuji antero tanah Asia Bangunan sayup tinggi, tambah indah, oh Singapura City!

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 How beautiful is Singapore, its name renowned across the world See it at night, brightly aglow and colourful A city crowded, serene, triumphant and praiseworthy throughout all of Asia Its buildings soaring high add to its splendour, oh Singapura City! Beyond just illumination and seaside recreation, Singapore’s denizens also indulged in the myriad commercial entertainments the evening offered. Kalau Ke Singapura names three famous amusement parks that drew consistently large crowds between the 1920s and 60s: Happy World, New World and Great World. The song records them as places for “modern dances” (joget moden) and memories unforgettable. In fact, the amusement parks featured a plethora of entertainments, such as Chinese and Malay opera, cinemas, cabarets, dance-halls and boxing matches. Uncle Murtabak recalls how it was like to be at New World in Japanese-occupied Singapore:

Malam-malam di Shonan-to* Masuk New World main lotto Kalau menang memang […]** Kalau kalah kena ketuk!

Nights in Shonan-to* Go to New World and play lotto If you win, it’s definitely […]** If you lose, you’ll be knocked!

*Singapore was renamed Shonan-to (light of the Showa Emperor) under Japanese rule **indiscernible

Gambling in these amusement parks was banned after the war.

TRANSMODERN ?現代 By the latter half of the 20th century, the parks saw rapidly declining patronage, as ever-more ‘modern’ diversions grew popular. The last of these - Happy World - was demolished in 2001. The city is also a literary site. Singapore was not just a pleasureground or a feast for the visual senses. As a motif, it had long featured prominently in the repertoire of classical Malay epics dating back centuries. Singapura Waktu Malam alludes to an episode from the 17th-century royal chronicle, Sejarah Melayu (The Malay Annals). It is a gruesome story known to most contemporary Singaporeans: a king of ancient Singapura - then already a wealthy port-city - puts an end to attacks on the island by garfish, after a child comes up with an ingenious solution. Threatened by his intelligence, the king orders his execution:

Sejak dulu dah tersurat Singapura tak kurang kisahnya Antara yang paling dahsyat ikan todak melanggar Singapura

Since days of old it has been written Singapore has never been short on stories Among the most terrible: That of the garfish invading Singapura

The city is not just to be narrativised; it is itself replete with narrative. It compels one to tell stories. Some of these songs resemble travel accounts to foreigners who had never visited. Others - like Uncle Murtabak - relate everyday incidents of life in the city: stories we tell each other as we collectively navigate urbanity’s absurdities. Such a profusion of stories of and about Singapore ought to make us resist attempts to typify it according to widely-assumed stereotypes, or rehearsed official histories. 26

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 POPULAR MUSIC AS LOST ARCHIVE Singapore marks its separation from Malaysia annually on ‘National Day’. We sing our city differently now. The Singapore government has commissioned a new patriotic song for National Day every year since 1984, all variations on a set of themes, such as national belonging and progress. They reflect the ideological imperatives of their time. In Singapore’s national narrative, today’s gleaming skyscrapers and bubblegum-coloured high-rise flats are pitted against the squalor and filth of Malaya: Ramlee and Saloma sing popular music of the East, an LP its expunged kampong. In the same year recorded in the 1960s as part of Seniman Bujang Lapok was released, Capitol Records’ “Capitol of the a great fire broke out in the district of World” series, which sampled music Bukit Ho Swee in western Singapore. from different countries. The ‘Malaya’ 16,000 were left homeless, after their album featured P. Ramlee and Saloma, with a street in Singapore’s largely wooden homes were destroyed. Chinatown as its cover art. Scholar Loh Kah Seng argues that “in the Singapore Story, the fire is depicted Source: Discogs as a ‘blessing in disguise’, whereby an enlightened government rehoused the ‘inert community’ of squatters after a disaster and set the country on the right path to progress and modernity.”6 Singapore’s modernisation plot has been reduced to a battle between the flat and the kampong, where the former finally triumphs. But as these songs show, even before Singapore exemplified characteristics of the well-planned city, it was already a celebrated centre of urban sophistication. These songs reflect an efflorescence of modernity 27

TRANSMODERN ?現代 of urban sophistication. These songs reflect an efflorescence of modernity that its many residents - ordinary men and women - actively participated in, built and sustained. The formal elements of these songs also embodied the cosmpolitan milieu inhabited by their composers and performers. They each represent a genre with origins elsewhere, which nonetheless assimilated seamlessly into Singapore’s musical landscape. Afro-Cuban rhythms, jazz, keroncong, and foxtrot found their way into the scores of great Malay composers like Ahmad Jaafar and Zubir Said (who would later go on to compose Singapore’s National Anthem). The historical moment they resurrect - an era when Singapore was still thought of as being part of Malaya - holds great significance to the city’s Malays. As the playwright Alfian Sa’at notes, this was also the golden age for the Singapore Malays not just due to their cultural achievements but their “integration to a wider Peninsular community”.7 They expressed optimism for a modernity that looked quite different from the one Singapore eventually came to represent. Separation from Malaysia was a moment of trauma, entailing the Malays’ cultural orphaning, and what Alfian termed “the disintegration of the Malay cultural psyche”.8 These songs are rarely aired today, and few Singaporeans now know they exist. Discovering this lost archive, however, enables us to realise that Singapore inhabited an array of historical imaginaries from competing discourses, beyond the one we are most familiar with now. It was also - like many other cities - the product of multiple visions of modernity, and its uncelebrated multitude of agents.

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 Notes “Modern Singapore – the City of Opportunity: IX. How Singapore Goes to Work”. Malaya Tribune. 7 April 1933. p. 15. 2 Imran Bin Tajudeen. “Beyond Racialised Representation: Architectural Linguae Francae and Urban Histories in Kampong Houses and Shophouses of Melaka and Singapore” in Rajagopalan and Desai, Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture and Modernity. Ashgate, 2013. pp. 213-252. 3 Ibid. 4 “The Sultan of Johor’s Singapore Residence”. Straits Times Weekly Issue. 6 December 1892. p. 19. 5 Nor Afidah Abdul Rahman. “Street Lighting”. Infopedia. 6 Loh Kah Seng. Squatters into Citizens: the 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore. Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. 7 Alfian Bin Sa’at. “The Absent Mother: Malay Cinema, Cultural Memory and Mediated Spectatorship” in S/pores: New Directions in Singapore Studies, Issue 14 (“Yang Tersirat”). 22 July 2015. http://s-pores.com/category/14-yang-tersirat/ 8 Ibid. 1

Playlist

This essay, first published online, was accompanied by a playlist curated by the author Singapura Di Kampong Jawa Momo Latif Oh Singapura Saloma Singapura Waktu Malam Saloma Uncle Murtabak M.Yatim Lenggang Singapore M.Yatim Kalau Ke Singapura R. Azmi Singapura Bandaraya Abdul Rahman

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FILM REVIEW

THE KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE Alicia Oanh Le

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 Imagine opening your eyes and being met with murky green waves crashing against rock banks, their ebb and flow turns into a string of white noise at the back of your head as your field of vision zooms out onto the vast oceanic view. At first sight it seems to be bare, untouched nature, but as you wander around, you become curious about what the bright sunshine, green and yellowish grass, men and women speaking in an unrecognisable language, and at one point you are ambushed bedazzled captivated confused fascinated overwhelmed by trippy light leaks in red yellow purple and blue across your vision, more men and women around you seem to be engaging in a spiritual quest. The water is relentless and the air is salty. Where is this place you ask. Who am I, you wonder. You are bewildered as in The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, for you have transcended into Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams, and Night Time Go, feature films by the Karrabing Film Collective. Founded in 2008, the Karrabing Film Collective is an award-winning group of about 30 artists and filmmakers, both indigenous and nonindigenous, who inhabit the rural community of Belyuen in northwestern Australia. They engage in the production of artistic works as a medium for self-representation, self-organisation, and commentary on the society they inhabit within this changing world. Their films, characterised by a strong “improvisional realism”, a term coined by Professor Elizabeth Povinelli, connotes the group’s sense of agency as they make their presence and personalities felt through their films. At the same time, this agency challenges the grand narratives of history, realism, and modernism. Indeed, with the long history of oppression and struggle suffered by Australian indigenous peoples under the hands of colonialism and neo-colonial policies in the new supposedly-civilised age, it is clear that the Karrabing Film Collective does not seek to create pictures that possess an uncanny quality for the sake of uncanniness itself, nor make films laden with brazen political images, but rather, they operate through the propositioning and juxtaposing of the various human conditions 31

TRANSMODERN ?現代 together. The title of one film, The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, brings together the mythology (mermaids) and the children’s classic Alice in Wonderland. The titular protagonist Aiden is placed between two forces: the “white people” who adopted him as a baby and are now in danger of extinction, and the natives of his land who are alienated by the outside world. Similarly, Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams draws upon indigenous peoples’ struggle for autonomy over their ancestral land, a movement galvanised by the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (or the Intervention for short) in 2007 by the Australia government that involved forceful evictions from indigenous territories and crackdown on basic human rights in these areas. The pretext of Wutharr was finding out what caused a motorboat breakdown on a trip to the deeper Karrabing’s country: was it technological failure, ancestral rage, or God’s test of faith? Using the word “country” to refer to the Karrabing’s land, the film and its on-screen subtitles suggest that there exists an alternative narrative to the established sovereignty of the Australian nation, one that asserts the Karrabing’s insistent ownership over their ancestral soils through their long history of dwelling, inhabiting, and regenerating there. In the scene where an indigenous woman is visited by ghosts of her ancestors, they claim to have come from 1952, from a place called Dellisaville (which she protested that it no longer exists); the images overlap to figures of people dancing on barren lands in sepia-toned vignettes. These references to points and places of history affirm the significance of collective history on a smaller, much overlooked scale: isn’t it purely logical that those who have had a longer lived history on these lands claim rightful ownership over them? Isn’t it sensible that those who lived and made their marks on these lands have a place in history? Of the three films Mermaids, Wutharr and Night Time Go, Wutharr proved to be the most challenging one to watch. Shot entirely on iPhone 6s, the film appears to be surprising democratic: not one single individual has

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 the spotlight on them for the entire time, and the film is loosely divided into three part so that everyone takes turn to tell their story from their point of view. This narrative plot, therefore, possesses only beginning, but no conclusion, devoting devotes most of its time for the character’s specific experiences, through which the viewers can peek into the workings of the Karrabing psyche. It certainly does not stress upon finding a solution, as the narrative of modernity would like us to expect, putting everything under close inspection and examination. In one of its more easily understandable yet politically bold sequence, the group of indigenous man encounters a fishing boat of a white young man named Jack, who is sailing at sea and drinking from a can of coke. The men asks for his name and if he has any water to give them, to which he replies, “Drink from your waterhole”. This sequence, which draws on the stereotypical racial conflicts, utilises familiar tropes to further enhance the political implications of the piece. The theme of ‘saltwater dreams’ here ties in closely with the group’s name: in Emiyengal Indigenous language, karrabing refers to the tide out of the sea level according to the progression of the moon, and an act of solidarity between indigenous people inhabiting the coastline that connects them with different people across different social strata to form an extended family. Hence, racist remarks towards the seawater can also be seen as a violation of this communion, exposing the faulty narrative of neo-colonialism in white-dominated society. How do all these speak for modernity and transmodernity,? Cinematically, the films by the Karrabing Film Collective break away from modernist filmic traditions, and instead, lays out in front of our eyes coastal visions that plots a space that acts against the mighty hands of globalisation. It seems to say to us that what is conceived of as modernity by default has no foothold here, and that this indigenous community abides by its own form of modernity. Strongly critical of settler modernity, the films shifts the stage of modernity from sprawling central business districts to rural nature. For once, the Karrabing suggests, humans can have the liberty to think and act beyond the encoded social order.

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READING LIST

VARIETIES OF MODERNITY Marcus Yee

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 Our postmodern world remains haunted by modernity, a force that has shaped modes of human inquiry, socio-cultural attitudes, and political organization. Modernity’s global reach attests to its colonial and imperial baggage, especially oppressions hinged on race, class, gender, and sexuality. Building on the theme behind the Comparative Literature Festival 2019: TRANSMODERN《？現代》, this reading list is a primer to the rich diversity of critical responses towards (Western) modernity. Critics work to untangle modernity’s many knots, emphasizing that modernities are not mere European or American exports, but multicultural products. This list is by no means exhaustive, offering only vignettes scattered across various disciplines, cultures, and contexts. The Underside of Modernity Enrique Dussel Transmodern or “trans-modernity” — the theme of this year’s Festival — is a term coined by Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel to denote the multicultural “interpretation of modernity in order to include moments that were never incorporated into the European version”, which also goes beyond postmodernism (taken as an extension of Euro-American modernity). This collection of essays by Dussel provides a concise look into his critique of Eurocentric modernity and his “philosophy of liberation” that speaks to a neo-imperialist moment of dependency, “Third World” underdevelopment, and global inequality.

TRANSMODERN ?現代 Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference Dipesh Chakrabarty Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s magisterial critique of Eurocentric historicism makes for an illuminating read, especially his deconstruction of the progressive, linear arrow of time embedded within civilizational discourse. The book’s evocative image of nonWestern peoples relegated to the “imaginary waiting room of history” speaks volumes about Western modernity’s discriminatory universalism. Alternative Modernities ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar This edited volume best captures the expansive breadth of scholarship working on hybrid modernities, with site-specific studies spanning from the ruins of modern architecture in Rio de Janeiro to the Afro-modernity of the African diaspora. The book also includes the essay, “Settler Modernity and the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition” by Elizabeth A. Povinelli, who is the coordinator of the Karrabing Film Collective, part of the film programme of this year’s Festival. As Gaonkar writes, “modernity is incomplete and necessarily so”—non-Western peoples are not mere “latecomers” to the twilight of modernity, but engaged in an ongoing struggle to redefine its terms. 36

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 The Question of Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics Yuk Hui A Keynote speaker of the Festival, philosopher Yuk Hui’s seminal book problematizes the universality of technology through Chinese philosophical traditions. More provocatively, Hui argues that the search for nonWestern modernities descends into false comparisons. Instead, he calls for a look into “cosmotechnics”, or technical activities that articulate cosmological orders specific to different cultures. The Enchantment of Modern Life Jane Bennett The story of modernity is often that of total rationalization trapped within Weber’s iron cage. Political philosopher Jane Bennett’s counter-story of modernity however, is one of enchantment, looking at non-human ethical possibilities through our encounters with animals, fictional beings, and even commodities. Passing Nella Larsen The sole fiction title in the list, American author Nella Larsen’s novel is a veritable masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. The novel follows Irene Redfield’s reunion with her childhood friend, Clare Kendry, two light-skin mulattos whose lives intersect the faultlines of race, gender, and class of 1920s New York. The novel’s picture of modernity is one that confronts the vicissitudes of identity. 37

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VIGNETTES

TRANSMODERN ? 現代 Various Contributors

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

www.complitfest2019.wixsite.com/transmodern

neven feelings of modernity still persist. Comparative Literature Festival U 2019: TRANSMODERN《？現代》is about manoeuvres, exclusions, redefinitions within and beyond Western modernity. They are the gestures, songs, fashion, languages, technologies, ideas and relationships defined against the backdrop of the ‘traditional’ or the ‘futuristic’. Against the hegemonic straight arrow of time defined by histories of colonization and globalization, marginal and colonized cultures have continued to negotiate the space-time compression of European and North American modernity. ONLINE EXHIBITION Throughout the Festival, a new chapter was published each week. Each chapter is structured by a rough chronological order, interrogating modernities in the past, present and future. When each chapters unfolds, the straight arrow of time swerves and bends these multiple modernities escape the linear time of progress, collide with one another, and occupy hyperstitial spacetimes. Chapter 1: Modern Times Chapter 2: (A)modern Presents Chapter 3: Futurologies

[Interlude: Trans — An Archeology by Video]

CHAPTER 1

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MODERN TIMES This chapter looks at ‘modernities’ through a span of multiple histories and geographies, focussing on keyframes in various space-times beyond Western modernity. Eschewing linear chronology and all-encompassing geographical representation under the guise of ‘world history’, the keyframes would zoom in on specific encounters where modernity is contested, re-appropriated and re-imagined. Modernism without modernization: Latin America In the context of decolonization, revolution and other political upheavals, modernity in Latin America took on a different valence from its Western brand by drawing upon indigenous philosophies, practices, and designs. At the center of Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity (1940) is a cyborgian interpretation Coatlicue, the Aztec deity who gave birth to the sun, moon, and stars, melding together both industry and the primordial earth.

Buddhist Modernisms As the world’s fourth largest religion, Buddhism has not only persisted as belief system in the modern world, but cross-pollinated and reformed itself with key discourses of Western modernism. Buddhist modernisms emerged in the beginning of the 19th century context of European colonisation of Asia and Christian missionization. There are many strands of Buddhist modernisms, such as “Engaged Buddhism”, that traces its roots in Vietnam and emphasizes egalitarianism and participation of women. Buddhist practices have also been adapt to technologies of the day, evidenced in the works of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, a famous and influential Thai ascetic-philosopher of the 20th century, who used photography and darkroom editing methods to propagate Buddha’s teachings.

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019 A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and Afrofuturism Where did Sun Ra, the eccentric twentiethcentury African-American mathematician, composer, mystic, poet, ritualist, and world teacher, come from and where did he go? Some said his true home was based on the second largest planet in the Milky Way. He used to tell audiences that he was a member of the Zulu nation and got them to tie him up, saying, “If the slave traders tried to take any of my people captive, we would release ourselves using our secret knowledge.” He would also say, “I am a myth”.

Eye-Gouging Rumors: Western Biomedicine in China

Western biomedicine’s prevalence on the modern global stage today masks the fact that its legitimacy was hard-worn through history. When the British missionary Robert Morrison operated in Macao and Guangdong province in the early 19th century, the status of Western biomedicine in China Invested in science fiction, history was marginal. Taboos around surgery made philosophy, occult, among other esoteric traditional Chinese medicine ineffectual for subjects, Sun Ra rethought multi- the treatment of eye problems. dimensional Afrofutures through African spiritualism and the African diaspora. Modernity’s contradictions between The otherworldly visions and sounds of secularism and religion was most the Solar-Myth Arkestra “Space was the pronounced in the work of medical Place”, was born out of conditions of urban missionaries: the specialization of segregation and marginalisation of South ophthalmetry had biblical overtones Side Chicago. These exuberant, utopian, relating to sight and illumination. and technologically-advanced Afrofutures belonged elsewhere, but they are The later period of the 18th century saw necessarily invoked against resistance towards Western medical the toxic here and missionary activities, where propaganda now. and rumors were spread against “the Pig Cult” and its illicit eye-gouging. The Chinese believed that Westerners stole valuable Chinese eyes to manufacture cameras, or that their eyes contained lead, which could be smelted into valuable silver. Resistance and misunderstandings towards medical missionaries culminated into the Tianjin massacre in 1870, where rumors resulted in anti-foreigner riots.

Laurene: In a dense area like Sham Shui Po where most of the things are orthogonal to densify to its maximum to gain the most profits, I try to map out where circular geometries are used.

TRANSMODERN ?現代

CHAPTER 2

(A)MODERN PRESENTS This chapter focuses on the ways the ‘modern’ is continually distended in contemporary times, with works from the day-long workshop, Unfolding Hong Kong. During the workshop, led by Laurene Cen and Sammie Ng, participants walked through Sham Shui Po, as a layered site of multiple modernities. Through exercises in sensing the city (through listening, sketching, recording, walking, photographing, remembering), participants worked together to produce maps of different media.

Lunar: After having lunch in Ah Ming, I felt desperate for a public toilet. Dismissed in exit B2 for 15 mins, I seized the chance to rush to exit C2 where located the nearest public toilet - Apliu Street public toilet - to me. Although my company all suggested me to find a McDonald, I insisted on heading to that one.

In collaboration with: Laurene Cen Sammie Ng Marcus Yee Lunar Tong Charlie Lee Zhu Yanmin Joe Marcus: Cities hosts different forms of life, of liveliness, encapsulated by the concept of yitnau. At the same time, there are competing visions of how life should be managed, controlled, expressed or embodied. This map looks at ways in which bodies and life intersect with the city’s accreted layers of modernity.

Sammie: This collage is a dramatisation of how density is practiced spatially - an attempt to make sense of everything I saw - an overwhelming experience when one sets foot in Shamshuipo - to see patterns in chaos, to form an understanding of the methods of madness in the neighbourhood.

Contributors: Jens Cheung, Kin Chui, Low Zu Boon, Luca Lum, and Marcus Yee

CHAPTER 3

FUTUROLOGIES Following a bumpy chronology that stretches from ideas of the past to the future, the final chapter concludes with ways in which various cultures make sense of the future. The binary of the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ is disrupted by looking at epistemologies, practices, technologies, and instruments across history. FUTUROLOGIES will include stories from, Dark Fluid: A Science Fiction Experiment by Angela Su, a collaborative exercise to re-imagine science fiction as a toolbox for empowerment, social justice, survival, and organizing alternative communities. After the first workshop, participants composed a text or visual responding to the discussion. 43

INTERLUDE

TRANS: AN ARCHEOLOGY BY VIDEO

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Complementing the film programme, Interlude: TRANS — An Archeology BULLETIN 2019 by Video explores the notions of transmodernity through the medium of video clips sourced from Youtube. These include: music videos, movie trailers, news footage, new media art, lectures, and other media. The curation could be found on the online exhibition.

Works included on the online exhibition were: 《疫區調查》謝柏齊 Epidemic Investigation Tse Pakchai 《迷失過去的未來》黎雋維 Future of the Forgotten Past Charles Lai 《十夜譚：香港發生了咩事》李挽靈 Decameron: Things Happened in Hong Kong Mary Lee

that

Courtesy of Angela Su and the authors.

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CREDITS

SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BULLETIN 2019

Society of Comparative Literature A.A.H.K.U.S.U. 2018-2019 Chairperson Le Ha Thu Oanh General Secretary Yee Marcus Yok Wan Academic Secretary Yee Marcus Yok Wan

Acknowledgements Prof. Nicole Huang Dr. J. Daniel Elam Faris Joraimi Alicia Oanh Le Marcus Yee Charlie Lee Sammie Ng Lauren Cen Lunar Tong

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Bulletin 2019: Transmodern Editing and Design: Marcus Yee Proofreading: Charlie Lee, Alicia Oanh Le Publisher: Society of Comparative Literature, A.A.H.K.U.S.U. Session 2018-2019 Address: Room 2A01, Fong Shu Chuen Amenities Centre, The University of Hong Kong Email: scomplit@hku.hk Website: scomplit@hkusu.hku.hk Date of Issue: 31st October 2019 Pages: 48 46