ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the popular rhetoric and history of Singapore as a strategic location is a basis from which can read "Sing lit". It provides a slightly different approach from recent criticism that highlights the importance of urban renewal and built space in Singaporean literary and cultural production. Rather than examining architecture, construction, and urban development, the chapter looks at themes of positioning, proximity, distance, and the implication of the "where" in Goh Poh Seng's If We Dream Too Long and Lydia Kwa's Pulse. The chapter reveals the challenges and aspirations to making claims to the "here" of Singapore in face of deterministic colonial and economic discourses. It also shows how Kwa's novel poses an affective relation between Toronto and Singapore, challenging depictions of Singapore as merely a site to be instrumentalized for economic ends. The chapter argues that Natalie Chia's queer, diasporic practices help to recover submerged racist, colonial histories forgotten in the presentation of Singapore as tourist destination.
