Commodifying Singaporean Cosmopolitanism for the World: Crazy Rich Asians and Soy Sauce for Beginners

This chapter continues with the theme of cosmopolitanism by first outlining some of the ways in which the conditions of production for Anglophone Singapore literature have changed in the last three decades. The older interpretive paradigms of postcolonial texts writing back to the European metropolitan center or of literature as part of nation-building cannot fully account for both the cultural negotiations taking place within these texts and the kinds of cultural labor they perform as texts in Singapore and in a world that has seen significant geopolitical shifts such as the end of the Cold War, the dominance of neoliberal globalization, and the increasing prominence and strategic importance of China in world politics. These developments are integral to the socio-historical practices of modern Chinese transnationalism in global capitalism, particularly that of flexible accumulation. Collectively, these practices delimit the wider horizon that the two Singapore-focused Anglophone novels I examine—Crazy Rich Asians and Soy Sauce for Beginners—both tacitly reference for meaning in their narrated worlds and resist in order to obtain a greater purchase on an expanded and multiply-sited readership. Written with a transnational gaze on Singapore in mind, both texts reveal a keenness to signal Singapore’s locational significance and to take advantage of the city-state’s branding as a global city. In their textual worlds, the West is not so much displaced as strategically provincialized to amplify a Singapore-inflected cosmopolitanism. In Crazy Rich Asians, such a cosmopolitanism is spectacularized through the depiction of Chinese dynastic wealth and conspicuous consumption while Soy Sauce for Beginners, opting for a rooted cosmopolitanism, focuses on the preservation of a Singapore Chinese family tradition and legacy business in the globalized present.