Introduction: Positioning Singapore as a Global City

In this introductory chapter, I plot the historical and culturally-specific co-ordinates for examining the defining dilemmas and tensions in Singapore’s millennial positioning of itself as a global city. I use a range of critical perspectives informed directly or indirectly by postcolonial scholarship and rely on the multi-disciplinary field of Singapore studies to delineate the economic and sociocultural changes that have occurred since the 1990s before directing my attention to Anglophone Singapore literature which has flourished during this period of the country’s strategic pivot to become a global city. Literature offers distinctive insights into a society’s cultural formation as literary texts serve dialectically to reflect the social context and milieu in which they are written while also interrogating and complicating through the aesthetics of language, affect, intertextuality and form the dominant logics of hegemonic discourse, normative ways of thinking, and prevailing forms of social organization. Developments in Anglophone Singapore literature in the new millennium show literature’s potential for asking difficult questions and pursuing ideological contradictions which, among other things, trouble the official story of Singapore’s development and identity.