Sponsors: Singapore Unbound, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the NYU Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium, and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Description:

Dystopias are fashionable, utopias are out, it would seem, if we believe the evidence of our current literary, visual, and media culture. However, our ravages on the human and natural worlds are so well documented that the documentation outstrips what dystopian creators can imagine. All the more reason then to look back to earlier thinkers to see what they offer us as signposts, metaphors, for a more optimistic future. Thinkers who can turn our felt vulnerabilities into a source of hope and solidarity.

What kinds of writing answer that call? That counter the confining boundedness of ethno-nationalistic imaginations but do not play into the hands of global capital? What kinds of movement or development enrich all lives, and not just some at the expense of others? Guided by the festival theme “Archipelago Dreaming,” the 5th biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC poses these momentous questions and invites featured writers to answer them. The writers come from different archipelagos—Southeast Asian and Caribbean—and other parts of the world that may be productively reimagined as such.

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