Editorial: So What?

Social Labelling, Discipline and Discrimination in Contemporary Singapore

Kwee Hui Kian and Teng Siao See

s/pores editors

---

In s/pores No. 4, Tan Pin Pin curated a provocatively titled theme issue on “What if…?” To ask this question of “if (not)…then what?”, one implicitly accepts the “what is” – without a priori questioning whatever that “what” referred to is/was in the first place. We do not claim that the question we pose in this issue is any more reflective about the Singapore society. Rather, our question is, perhaps, something of a cheeky rejoinder, possibly a little darker in the way it is posed.

Read Full Post »

Interview with Alvin Tan

Transcribed and compiled by Kwee Hui Kian

---

Preamble:
On February 5, 1994, the Straits Times (ST) published a report by Felix Soh that Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma – artistic director and resident playwright of The Necessary Stage (TNS) – were trained at workshops conducted by the Brecht Forum in New York. After this fiasco of insinuating that they were attempting to promote Marxist principles through theatre in Singapore, both Tan and Sharma went abroad for further studies in Directing and Playwriting respectively.

Read Full Post »

Interview with John Gee

Transcribed and compiled by Kwee Hui Kian

---

An activist of migrant workers’ rights, John Gee was at the time of interview President of Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a non-profit organisation that is concerned with the welfare of migrant workers. Among its initiatives, TWC2 has launched a “Day Off Campaign” for foreign domestic workers as well as campaigned for a standard contract for domestic workers and their employers.

Read Full Post »

Interview with Corinna Lim

Transcribed and compiled by Teng Siao See

---

The Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) was established in 1985 as a non-profit organization that campaigns for gender equality through research and advocacy as well as through provision of social services for women. In March 2009, AWARE was briefly taken over by an evangelical conservative Christian group of women.

Read Full Post »

Routes not Roots

Philip Holden

Review of Robert Yeo, Routes: A Singaporean Memoir, 1940-75, Singapore: Ethos Book, 2011, 384 pages.

---

Robert Yeo’s Routes: A Singaporean Memoir 1940-1975 doesn’t at first seem like a memoir at all. The book consists of photographs, prose vignettes, fully transcribed letters, documents such as school reports, and long quotations from sources as diverse as Cecil Northcote Parkinson and Lee Kuan Yew, often extending for a couple of pages in small type.

Read Full Post »