The Periphery Writes Back: Reading Two Plays by Joel Tan

Abstract

This paper aims to quantify the pressure exerted by inherited aesthetic rubrics on recent Singaporean theatre. It takes, as its premise, the stipulations of world systems theory, which depicts Singapore as a peripheral price-taker in an unequal, global economy of cultural exchange. However, it goes on to challenge the theory’s deterministic insinuations that dramatic taste must always flow from more dominant, developed sites of production elsewhere, to smaller literary sites like Singapore. Drawing on the work of an up-and-coming playwright, Joel Tan, it demonstrates that a peripheral writer may disrupt this pre-set transference of value, by writing work that speaks specifically from the fringes, for the fringes. In Tan’s hands, a play becomes “good†by taking full advantage of its peripheral condition; ultimately, his work appeals by being self-consciously situated outside of the world’s literary centres, and expounding on this situation intelligently.