The Storytelling State: Performing Life Histories in Singapore

Singapore has become what I call the storytelling state, referring to the nation’s newfound interest in a specific form of narration that emerged within the last decade. In such a state, public (auto)biographical storytelling, elicited through visualised narrative interviews, proliferates and constitutes the nation’s mediascape. Governmental agencies and government-linked institutions actively facilitate this phenomenon through campaigns and funding incentives. Examining several key campaigns from the period of 2009-2018 – “Singaporean of the Day”, the Singapore Memory Project (SMP), “SG Cares” and Honour (Singapore) – I show how the state cultivates an intimate, confessional public. The SMP campaign in particular generated a new paradigm of communicating the plotlines, lessons, and telos of the ‘Singapore Story’ by refiguring the national archive onto everyday bodies in a pedagogical exercise of identity and belonging. Life stories, marketed as authentic windows to the private self, also produce normative ways of feeling, doing and being Singaporean in accordance with contemporary social concerns. Going against the grain of the state’s tendency to practice governance only in terms of quantitative outputs and statistics, these performances qualitatively ‘conduct the conduct’ of Singaporeans through repeated exposure. Performance theory, with its emphasis on framing, audiencing, embodiment and making the familiar unfamiliar, brings the fictive nature of life history-telling to the fore. While popular and academic discourses around life storytelling tend to frame it as a positive exercise in empowerment, the Singaporean case makes it clear that the idea of ‘giving voice’ to the non-elite and the marginalised can have injurious effects that are not necessarily unique to Singapore. I argue that this process of giving an account of oneself obscures structural inequalities and interpellates some subjectivities as more recognisable than others. At stake here is the performance of citizenship. That said, the refiguration of the Singapore Story onto Singaporean bodies is not a tidy mapping of performativity (the discursive reproduction of norms) onto performance (the materialisation of bodies). Affective and embodied tellings make the absolute control of signification and transmission difficult, creating slippages and excesses in meaning with effects that transgress the normative demands of the storytelling state. When the national mise-en-scène seems to be life itself, what does it mean to have a life in Singapore