Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore by Cheryl Narumi Naruse (review)

In 2010, Singapore's Economic Development Board (EDB) introduced a market strategy—"Global-Asia"—in an effort to reinvent Singapore as a "'home' for multinational corporations" and capitalist growth (4). The strategy's name formalizes a process that had begun in the late 1990s with the Singaporean state's efforts to attract global capital through various economic programs. In the ensuring decades, Singapore has been cited as not only an "economic model" of success for nations of the Global South, but also "a globally significant bearer of cultural capital … a site of art and pleasure" (2). In Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore, Cheryl Narumi Naruse contextualizes "Global-Asia" within a larger matrix of neo-Orientalism, neoliberal governance, and narrative logics to ask: How does Global Asia operate both as economic strategy and aestheticized matter?

Becoming Global Asia makes an important contribution to thinking about contemporary Asia, a topic that, as Naruse astutely points out, suffers from illegibility in both "popular responses [and] in US academic criticism" (130). Following a Eurocentric reading practice, Asia can all too easily be treated as the continued legacy of Western forces, hence rendering the terms "contemporary" and "Asia" irreconcilable by implication. What is significant about Global Asia is that it explicitly claims the "global," a descriptor that would otherwise normally be coded as "Western." Under Global Asia, the Singaporean state both imagines itself within a new global dynamic of power and endeavors to remake the global in its own image. As such, Becoming Global Asia reckons with the enduring context of US declinism, in which imperial structures linger even as "empire is no longer the center of this story of power" (22).

How is hegemonic power reimagined, in particular through "soft power," in the diminishing presence of empire? And how does Global Asia index new movements in global capital, both symbolically and materially? In particular, Naruse compellingly argues that this story articulates the demand for retheorizations of what she calls "postcolonial capitalism." Emerging within the "trajectory of decolonizing nationalisms following the post-1945 restructuring of the world into a three-world order," postcolonial capitalism is presented by the Singaporean state as the rational corrective to past injustices under the British Empire (9). At the same time, postcolonial capitalism obscures the fact that capitalism inherently reproduces systems of extractive colonial violence. In her chapters, Naruse explores different genres that constitute the symbolic order of Global Asia in the service of postcolonial nationalism.

The first chapter discusses anthologies and their relationship to postcolonial Singaporean development. In contrast to understandings of the postcolonial nation-state that gain ideological coherence through the novel form, the anthology seeks to "situate itself in a global context" and render its (new) national culture legible to the world (29). In calling attention to the anthology's functional focus on legibility, Naruse adroitly demonstrates that "questions of national consolidation" are intertwined with "economic and political dynamic[s] in the world" (29). In chapter 2, Naruse turns to the aestheticization of overseas Singaporeans through journalistic compilations of demographics. The aesthetics of overseas Singaporeans, Naruse argues, is an aesthetics of "population," the "noncontinuous, serialized representation of flat characters" that contrasts with the more familiar nationalist narrative of a "singular [and] exceptional" hero (51). Demographic compilations of overseas Singaporeans are less interested in uncovering the interiority of its characters, and more interested in how overseas Singaporeans can, in turn, reflect Singapore's cosmopolitan status. What is particularly insightful here is how Naruse extends flatness as a key aesthetic of Global Asia, one that "foregrounds space rather than time" (62). In recognizing mobility as the privileged marker of wealth in the present, the population aesthetic does not reveal the depth of its characters but, rather, treats its characters as conduits for potential spaces of consumerism.

Moving beyond an analysis of postcolonial nations and the commodification of diasporic cultures, Becoming Global Asia argues...