“My generation,” Singaporean playwright (and USP alumnus) Joel Tan remarks, “is sick with nostalgia.” Perhaps Tan (b. 1987) means “generation” in a narrow sense, but we can certainly wonder if, post-1965, Singaporeans and even Singapore as a nation have often seem gripped by nostalgia—if not continuously, then at various and multiple moments of our history. The most fundamental thing we will do in this class is to identify and examine such moments, though not in a strictly chronological way. We will look at the decades after independence, when, among other things, the physical landscape of Singapore drastically changed; the years around SG50, when Singapore celebrated its golden jubilee and the state explicitly encouraged us to look back at our past; and more recently, when immigration has transformed the country’s demographics. At the same time, even as this way of talking about “moments in Singapore’s history” implies that nostalgia is some sort of emotion that the whole nation feels at historical junctures, the module will also consider instances of Singaporean art that may not so much reflect an existing nostalgia, but participate in or even initiate its creation.

If the first part of Tan’s comment identifies nostalgia as rife in Singapore (and Singapore art), the second part provocatively characterizes such nostalgia as an illness, a disease, an affliction—more generally, as negative. Tan is not alone in this characterization, and the module will also try to understand how and why many artists, cultural and intellectual historians, geographers, literary critics, political thinkers, and sociologists have argued against nostalgia, and how and why just as many have sought to rehabilitate it. We cannot hope to be exhaustive here, but will focus on several debates about the effects of nostalgia that may be especially relevant to Singapore. Thus, we will analyze the politics of nostalgia, its relation to progress and progressivism, and in the context of exile; and we will examine the relationships between nostalgia and heritage, memory, history, sentiment, temporality and historicity. Do these critiques and debates apply in the case of Singaporean nostalgia? Or can the cases of nostalgia in Singapore help us rethink the potential and power of nostalgia?

Our more theoretical readings will come from Kevin Blackburn, Alastair Bonnett, Svetlana Boym, Chua Beng Huat, Fred Davis, Margaret Farrar, Paul Grainge, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Michael Kammen, Loh Kah Seng, Andrew Murphy, Pierre Nora, Kenneth Paul Tan, Brenda Yeoh and Lily Kong. The works and genres of Singapore art, expansively defined, will include: advertising campaigns; short stories by Alfian Sa’at and speculative fiction; poems by Boey Kim Cheng and Koh Jee Leong; essays by Simon Tay; a graphic novel by Oh Yong Hwee and Koh Yong Teng; a documentary by Tan Pin Pin; films and telemovies by Abdul Nizam Khan, Boo Junfeng, Eric Khoo, K. Rajagopal, Royston Tan, and Kelvin Tong.