Cosmopolitan Pedagogies: Revisiting Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Short Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v8i1.463Abstract
This paper explores the author’s experience in teaching Lim’s short stories in Singapore over the course of two decades. Lim’s short fiction has often been seen as subordinate to her poetry and to her longer works of prose fiction and memoir, and it has been read as a part of a career that evolves from a specific politics of location in Malaysia to an engagement with larger questions of feminism, minoritisation and cosmopolitanism identity in the United States. Such a historicist reading needs to be balanced by the reading perspectives on Lim’s fiction of newer generation of Singapore students to whom their settings are now often unfamiliar. Far from being a portrait of a now vanished past in another country, however, Lim’s fiction may fruitfully be read within the context of contemporary Singapore, especially in its questioning of doxologies concerning racialisation and sexuality and its promotion of what may initially seem a paradox: a local cosmopolitanism. Recent critical work on the short story as genre, indeed, suggests that questions regarding a local cosmopolitan ethics may be made particularly acute by the formal features of the short story, features of which Lim makes skilful use.
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