Reading popular Nanyang: literary realism in plurilingual Singapore

This article approaches the topic of Nanyang popular culture from the perspective of language use and language politics. Revisiting a canonical text by Miao Xiu, Singapore under the Roofs (1951), which is set in Singapore on the cusp of decolonisation, this article examines the left-leaning realist camp’s engagement with a plurilingual and transnational public sphere where different forms of popular culture—some profit-driven, others politically oriented—competed for resources and audiences. The story’s incorporation of non-Mandarin Chinese languages and non-standard linguistic registers draws attention to how linguistic variations associated with the subaltern class mediate access to their subjectivity. In seeking to broaden the scope of current discussions of the language question beyond the conventional framing of the state’s ideology of language in Singapore, the analysis here refutes the technological determinism inherent in excluding literature in print from popular culture simply because its medium of production has been overtaken by “newer” technologies.