Counter-cartographies: Literary Wayfinding in Transnational Cities

My project examines how minority literary texts from Singapore, Vancouver, and Toronto intervene in capitalist and cartographical configurations of urban space. Reading contemporary literary texts as detours in the overlapping postcolonial realities of Canada and Singapore, I demonstrate how these novels, films, poems, and short fictions resist the abstraction of these capitalist spaces, restoring sociality and human complexity. My study draws from the spatial theories of cultural geographers like Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and David Harvey, and anthropologist Timothy Ingold. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I use the spatial tactics of wayfinding, confabulation, and indeterminacy as modes of reading literary texts. These tactics challenge cartographical understandings of urban spaces, opening them up to the prospects of unforeseen pasts, lived presents, and unpredictable futures. My readings of these texts contribute to a spatial politics that enriches our current understanding of the relationship between literature and space, the imagined and the real, the fictional and the material. My work on contemporary Vancouver and Singapore examines representations of the cities in urban planning documents, material sites, and popular media. Both urban sites began as cartographic fictions, dreamed into existence by planners and land speculators. They continue to be spectacularly mapped, planned, and commodified in the late capitalist period. My work places these cultural texts in dialogue with recent literary urbanisms from both cities including works by Madeleine Thien, Wayde Compton, Sachiko Murakami, Tan Shzr Ee, Tan Pin Pin and Alfian Sa’at. My project then turns to three transnational novels by Lydia Kwa, Larissa Lai, and Dionne Brand that produce a complex urban politics that goes between and beyond Singapore and Canada. These transnational counter-cartographies resist celebratory accounts of neoliberal globalization while addressing the realities of migration and diaspora through the various genres of historical fiction, immigrant narrative, and dystopian fiction.Ph.D.2018-02-12 00:00:0