By Jonathan Chan

Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore
Cheryl Narumi Naruse
University of California Press (2023) / 232 pages / SGD 47.30  

My family relocated to Singapore in 1997. My father, formerly a stockbroker in New York selling Asian equities to American clients, had decided he wanted to return to Asia. Malaysia was a market that he was familiar with and where he sought to explore investment opportunities. Our settling in Singapore was an agreement between him and my mother, who had found living in the city less drastic an adjustment given her past stays in Seoul and Hong Kong. However, what my father did not anticipate was the Asian Financial Crisis – precipitated by the collapse of the Thai baht that resulted in capital flight across East and Southeast Asia. While South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand were the worst hit, Singapore was not spared either as it entered a recession. Singapore's position as a regional financial hub, as well as its proximity to the most severely affected markets, were exacerbating factors behind this. My father's aspirations, as circumstance would have it, were to be hindered.

The year 1997 emerges as central to literary scholar Cheryl Narumi Naruse's analysis in Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore. Naruse cites the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis as a pivotal moment in Singapore's transformation into what she describes as "Global Asia". Naruse explains that Global Asia is

the perception of Singapore as an alluring Asian setting for capitalist flourishing. Such a setting, in this instance, is hospitable to finance, corporations, and the global elite while also productive of a diasporic, cosmopolitan workforce for the global economy.

Naruse borrows the notion of Global Asia directly from a broad strategy advanced by Singapore's Economic Development Board in 2010, one that envisioned Singapore as a "home" for multinational corporations, though she also argues of the belated application of this nomenclature given the country's overtures towards global capital in preceding decades.

This is in contrast to what she cites as conventional academic use of the notion of Global Asia and Global Asias – that is, its use in interdisciplinary academic subfields seeking to "free knowledge production about Asia from the limitations of the East/West binaries that reproduce parochial notions of Asia" for the former, and "intersecting disciplines of Asian, Asian diasporic, and Asian American studies". What Naruse evinces, by examining the seemingly protean nature of Singapore within the fields of postcolonial and Asian diasporic studies broadly, is the eschewing of conventional impressions of postcolonial nations as decrepit or corrupt or chaotic or poor, evading easy political and cultural categorisation within the broader schema available for the analysis of East and Southeast Asian countries. Both capital accumulation and anglophonic legibility stand out as differentiating factors for Singapore. Such characteristics are emblematic of new possibilities within transpacific studies – rather than serving as a bridge between the "disciplinary siloes and nationalist methodologies" of Asian American and Asian studies, as Naruse argues, Global Asia requires a reconsideration of the idea of 'postcoloniality' altogether.

Naruse's approach is distinct from other approaches to Asian studies, such as Kuan-Hsing Chen's Asia as Method (2010), with its emphasis on establishing inter-Asian points of reference for political and cultural analysis and overcoming the mutual entanglements of imperialisation, colonisation and the Cold War. Instead, Naruse takes Singapore as a use-case to define the positionality and nimbleness of Global Asia as such:

Rather than aspire to dominance, as with imperial ideology, Global Asia strategizes from a subordinated position within the global socioeconomic order and from a historical consciousness of colonialism. Instead of overthrowing existing sovereignty, this instantiation of postcolonial capitalism emphasizes a capacity to maneuver an already existing order of power.

The effectiveness of Naruse's theorisation lies in its abstraction, in effect, of Singaporean foreign policy, with its slated aims not only of defending Singaporean sovereignty but also expanding its political and economic space abroad, towards the characteristics of Global Asia. Global Asia proceeds, seemingly, from a recognition of Singapore as a "small state", as a beneficiary of the US military presence in East and Southeast Asia guaranteeing freedom of naval navigation and open trade routes, and the relative regional stability required for trade and commerce to flourish.

However, what is also noteworthy is the way Naruse's analysis proceeds from another curious yet intelligently cited source: Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's 1998 memoir The Singapore Story. Naruse cites Lee's harrowing recollections living under the Japanese Occupation, but also his focus on accumulating capital to "change it into something of more permanent value", such as through the construction and trade companies he ran during the period. Naruse highlights how Lee praises the "smart and the opportunistic" individuals who worked with the Japanese, such as the Shaw brothers. Rather than condemning them for "war profiteering" or examining any moral dilemmas that accompanied alignment with the Japanese, Lee's tone is "congratulatory if not wondrous". She argues that Lee attributes "survival" during the occupation to business acumen. Combined with the anticolonial thinking catalysed in the wake of the fall of the British in Singapore, as well as the "improvisational" abilities needed to thrive under military occupation, Naruse argues that to Lee, "capitalist accumulation is rationalized as fundamental to a decolonizing political consciousness and process". By examining Lee's memoirs as literary artefact, Naruse is able to identify the formation of a "cultural imaginary and historicity of capitalism", contributing to her definition of the manoeuvrability of Global Asia.

Central to Naruse's argument is another figure: Lee's successor, Goh Chok Tong. It is under Goh's auspices in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis that Singapore would transition to become a new economy, catalysing a transition to becoming a knowledge economy. Naruse cites Goh's call for a "reorient[ing of] society to meet the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, cultural and social needs of [Singapore's] people". Such a vision emphasised knowledge-based services including healthcare, education, finance, entertainment and advertising. This would precede the publication of various Renaissance City Reports, which in retrospect seems especially on-the-nose if we are to consider Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt's notion of "self-fashioning". The Renaissance City Report advances the notion of Singapore as a "global arts city", "a cultural centre in the globalised world", "one of the top cities in the world to live, work and play in" and where "there is an environment conductive to creative and knowledge-based industries and talent".

In this report, the "creative class" is seen as a necessary component of a "knowledge city"; simultaneously, the report recognises that "Cultural development is a domain in which [the government] is less likely to succeed purely by its control and dominance". Amidst the art fairs, animation and game studios, touring international theatre troupes and bilateral film productions that have taken place in Singapore as of late, these reports may seem prescient, albeit facilitated through the active role of the state through the EDB. Naruse's provocation is that the texts she examines in her book, namely demographic compilations, coming­-of-­career narratives and the princess fantasy materialise, only in the aftermath of the 1997 crisis and the beginning of this economic transition. Naruse outlines a trajectory from independence to the present through the presence of various genres. As she writes:

Genre has been methodologically central to this book. The emergence of major and popular anthologies, demographic compilations, coming-of-career narratives, and the princess fantasy at particular historical moments of economic change—state developmentalism, Asian Values, and Global Asia—reveal the cultural capitalist logics of their moments. My close readings of the texts and genres of Global Asia further elucidate how such cultural logics are not only responding to global economic imperatives by, for example, cultivating a cosmopolitan, diasporic citizenry, but also negotiating historical layers of postcolonial governance and evolving economic conditions within Singapore and beyond.

At the same time, because of the heterogeneity that exists within Singapore, with its diverse constituents across the Chinese, Malay, Indian, Eurasian and Peranakan communities, among others, there is a more conspicuously self-conscious need for Singapore to identify itself as 'Asian'. Naruse argues that it is the predominance of English in Singapore that has allowed it to distinguish itself from other Global Asia cities as legible. She writes:

Singapore's soft power and increased cultural capital is made possible by Singapore's anglophonic legibility, or its cultural readability as Westernized English is crucial for understanding the globalized dynamics of power in the Singaporean context, and, indeed, this is the key mode through which Singapore differentiates itself from other Global Asia sites […] In Singapore, English is the language of governance, the most prevalent literary language, and a language fraught with class privilege because of its uneven distribution among Singapore's multiracial constituents. It is also, of course, a language with colonial baggage and a language that continues to bring legibility to the island-nation. Through English, imperialisms, both past and current, play out.

Naruse's project is of the continuous historicisation of genre within the particular contexts of junctures in Singapore's literary history and conditions. What literary analysis allows for Naruse is a perhaps more robust engagement with the forms of sedimentation that have occurred in Singaporean literary history. In doing so, Naruse consciously avoids engaging both with generic forms more typically considered in Singaporean literary-historical analysis, say considerations of poetry, novels or plays, as well as nationalist readings that are concerned with the ways texts accede to or resist state narratives. Perhaps it is Naruse's own manoeuvrability as a US-based scholar of Singaporean literature that has enabled a materialist analysis of her chosen texts.

It is perhaps here, as a tangent, where I see the story of my own life fitting within Naruse's metanarrative. In many senses, I am a child of Global Asia, with my parents and I having arrived in Singapore in 1997 in transition from a predominant experience of Asian marginality in America. My own grandparents had experienced forms of Japanese colonisation – my paternal grandparents in Malaya and my maternal grandparents in Korea. The question of the malleability between Asian American and Singaporean identity, if at all, has been one I have constantly negotiated, particularly since giving up my American citizenship to retain my Singaporean one. Rather than simply being a matter of academic contention, it is a fundamental question of identity that has beleaguered me for most of my life. And if it is the hospitality of Global Asia that has made my life possible – the anglophonic legibility that allowed my parents to settle in Singapore, its proximity to the countries of origin of my family, the continuity between my father's past life in Wall Street and the country's then-focus on building its status as a regional finance hub – then Global Asia ceases to merely be a hermeneutic approach towards the literatures of Singapore but in many senses towards my own life (and by extension my own writing) as well.

Becoming Global Asia unfolds in four chapters across specific genres she identifies: anthologies, demographic compilations, coming-of-career narratives and the princess fantasy. The specificity of Naruse's generic definitions distinguishes her argument from more conventional criticism of broader literary categories such as plays, novels or theatre, which is where the distinctiveness of her contribution lies. Naruse takes anthologies as her starting point in Singaporean literary history pre-1997, rather than oft-cited long poems or other texts of mythicised nation-building purchase. Naruse argues that the anthology is:

a form that was at once instrumental for state-­led efforts in postcolonial capitalist development and used by Singaporean writers and editors to contest those imperatives. It is a literary and cultural site of contestation. […] the changes in aesthetic and political priorities of the Singapore anthology track with shifts in Singapore's economic ideologies—namely, the developmentalism of early independence and Asian Values.

The very form of the anthology is a consolidated one, typically anchored by a key theme or idea and curated at the discretion of an editorial team. Derived from the Greek term for 'bouquet', Naruse traces the history of the genre from its association with canon formation and preservation to later anthologies' aspirations to "unsettle Eurocentric literary values", through anthologies centring the writing of those once on the periphery. The counter to this, however, is the objection Naruse cites from Collen Lye and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that the anthology's "plural form can also reaffirm a problematic racial politics that relies too heavily on the performance of diverse representation and ultimately flattens difference".

There are anthologies and counter-anthologies, but Naruse highlights that literary anthologies in Singapore not only played a role in allowing for national identity to be expressed and negotiated by their editors and contributors, but also serve as a form of national literary infrastructure. Naruse cites key figures such as Edwin Thumboo, whose anthology The Poetry of Singapore (1985) pushed back against "the imperatives of legibility with an aesthetic of translation", and Chandran Nair, under whom Woodrose Publications published anthologies such as the multilingual Singapore Writing (1977) and the short-story collection The Sun in Her Eyes (1976), edited by Geraldine Heng. Naruse outlines that anthology editors are "rarely held up as creative beings", with their reputations as existing authors or professors conferring the role of the editor with particular prestige. It is these editorial efforts that would result in international publishers, namely Heinemann and Federal Publications, beginning to publish Singaporean writing.

These efforts contrast with literary production sponsored both by state institutions and publishers such as Federal Publications for the Ministry of Culture and the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, as well as multinational corporations, such as Shell and Esso. For the former, Thumboo's The Poetry of Singapore is featured in a series of ASEAN literary anthologies, attempting to provide proportional representation of Singapore's literary traditions. For the latter, major oil and petroleum corporations were involved in sponsoring anthologies, competitions and creative writing seminars, such as the 'NUS-Shell Short Plays Series' in the 1980s. Naruse argues that such activities accorded to these oil and petroleum companies "goodwill by portraying some notion of social responsibility and humanitarians", which are arguably at odds with current environmentalist sensibilities. Nevertheless, they highlight the influence of state developmentalism and global economic imperatives on literary production in Singapore.

Contemporary anthologies, however, seem to have been driven by other factors – the persistent popularity of horror as edited by Pugalenthi Sr and published by VJ Times, the surge in anthologies in the 2010s through the groundswell of work generated through various Singapore Poetry Writing Months, and several bilateral anthologies. Naruse's attention, focused on the role of the anthology in shaping a sense of identity amidst the complexity and fluidity engendered by Singapore's transition to Global Asia, perhaps sidesteps the anthologies published by university students in the 1950s and 1960s. While she does refer to the 1953 prose and poetry anthology L'essai, written by Raffles Institution students, perhaps such anthologies precede the most drastic of transformations under the auspices of Global Asia, which itself exists in a firmly postcolonial epoch.

The book's shift from anthologies to demographic compilation, what Naruse defines as a "middlebrow collection of journalistic writing that depicts a population", while unintuitive, is also persuasive in illuminating Naruse's argument surrounding the emergence of Global Asia. Based on "recurring characteristics within a population and [using] an organizing principle that recalls the administrative logics of colonialism and biopolitical governance", Naruse's choice of text to elucidate this is 'Singaporean Abroad', a series of profile pieces run by The Straits Times in locales such as New York, Sydney, Astana and Lappeenranta, and '50 Red Dots Around the World', a special issue of be movement magazine commemorating Singapore's 50th year of independence. Seriality, or the imposition of labels onto groups of people, is described by Naruse as the "aesthetic emphasis of Global Asia". While the former shows how Overseas Singaporeans are used to transform the "territorial basis" of Singapore's conception of itself, the latter criticises and rejects how the state instrumentalises Overseas Singaporeans for the project of Global Asia.

Naruse draws on several key sociological concepts to strengthen her argument: "bound and unbound serialities", with the former performing social control while the latter allowing for "individuals to imagine themselves as larger than face-to-face solidarities"; cosmopolitanism, regarded by PAP leaders as an existing tradition within Singapore also central to building national legitimacy; and "critical nationality", explained by Weihsin Gui as a project of "critical rationality motivated by a national consciousness that reveals, resists, and reconceptualizes the hypostasizing effects of instrumental rationality expressed through the determinate constructions of national identities." These provide the theoretical structures from which Naruse analyses discursive shifts in the construction of Singapore's citizenry – from Operation Franchise in 1957 in which qualified foreign-born residents were registered as citizens for nation-building, to accusations of disloyalty towards Singaporeans leaving for educational opportunities abroad in the 1990s and 2000s, to their celebration under the conditions of Singapore's transition to a neoliberal, knowledge economy today.

The notion of the Overseas Singaporean is rehabilitated: rather than the "quitters" they were derided as by Goh Chok Tong during his 2002 Singapore National Day Rally speech, the "Singaporean diaspora" are seen as instrumental in advancing Singaporean economic interests globally. The instructive metaphoric shift is from "brain drain" to "brain circulation". Jeremy Tiang's It Never Rains on National Day (2015) is cited to demonstrate characters who "perform exactly the kind of Overseas Singaporean ethos that the state seeks to develop among its citizenry." Tiang's characters, who are globally mobile, cosmopolitan and highly educated, reveal how both Singapore's "top-down model" as well as neoliberal ideology create a "claustrophobia", one he refutes by advocating for a "more organic connectivity" between people. Tiang's short stories possess an implicit critique of the model of Global Asia, evading the primary structuring forces of state-driven narrative.

Admittedly, the analysis performed on the 'Singaporean Abroad' and '50 Red Dots Around the World' is somewhat less engaging, though that may be more a reflection of the turgid prose of the texts themselves. What is more persuasive, however, is how Naruse is able to effectively tease from them ideological implications ­– the 'Singaporean Abroad' series is able to expand "the territorial imagination of the nation" and train "local readers to view the world in terms of sticky planes". The seeming aesthetic and structural flatness of the series is intended to create not just a legibility of the rest of the world, but also portend the possibilities of readers themselves becoming 'global citizens'.

By contrast, '50 Red Dots' includes subjects that are more likely to have pursued paths less vaunted within the frame of neoliberal capitalism, eschewing corporate jobs for pursuits in activism, photography, poetry and social entrepreneurship. They include subjects from ethnic minority, LGBTQ and disabled communities. Perhaps it is a focus on living abroad that reveals "the idiosyncrasies of Singapore's historical trajectory and governance", rather than how living abroad can become accessible to a Singaporean reader, that is biggest point of differentiation for '50 Red Dots' from 'Singaporeans Abroad'. The subjects of '50 Red Dots' critique Singapore's lack of empathy for the vulnerable and its excessive focus on work, which Naruse writes "reproduces some of the orientalist discourse of unfeeling", while also instrumentalising certain state discourses of capitalism for self-representation. Naruse's highlighting of the role played by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Singapore, in funding the publication is noteworthy, highlighting the Fukuda Doctrine, or Japan's soft power approach to ASEAN member states as a form of penance for imperial atrocities. Naruse's argument is that the issue "sets up the affective conditions for gratitude" towards such Japanese benefactors, making legible Japanese soft power, though the precise implications of this on the construction of Singaporean identity in these texts is not entirely clear. Rather, it is held up as an example of Japan's negotiation with its colonial history, of which Singapore was part.

If the first two chapters of Naruse's book are interested in subjecthood, the creation of subjects in Global Asia, her later two chapters turn their focus to subjectivity within Global Asia, or the forming of an interiority under its conditions. Naruse introduces the concept of the "coming-of-career" narrative, in which "the global, neoliberal economy dictates the processes that help form an ideal, mature, enterprising self. Work is the basis of maturity." With the "coming-of-career" narrative, Naruse retains the element of the bildung, referring to "education, culture, formation, growth, or development" by various definitions, which overlaps with the more conventionally understood bildungsroman. To step away from literature for a moment, the "coming-of-career" teleology is a metanarrative that has structured many of my own interactions since completing graduate studies and starting a job – the persistent notion of university as a time of leisure and being untethered, to the "harsh" realities of work. Naruse argues that the emergence of such narratives, dramatising the inflection point at which individuals enter the workforce, seems to "confirm Singapore's Global Asia status as a site that produces professionalized, corporate knowledge workers for the global economy and evidence of its exceptionality".

Naruse turns to several texts as examples of this narrative – Isa Kamari's novel The Tower (2002), Hwee Hwee Tan's novel Mammon Inc. (2002), the state promotional booklet Conversations of Coming Home (2012), Anthony Chen's film Ilo Ilo (2013), Troy Chin's graphic novel series The Resident Tourist, and Rebecca Bustamente's memoir Maid to Made (2014). Fanon and Foucault are cited to theorise postcolonial histories of capitalism in the production of a neoliberal subjectivity: Fanon asserts the importance of labour and capital accumulation as the basis of postcolonial economic development, achievement and agency in response to empire, while Naruse explicates through Foucault how many of the conceptual tenets of neoliberalism, with their emphases on individual enterprise, were also central to the economic structures of colonialism. These provide a framing of the "coming-of-career" narrative and motivations behind work as embedded in the histories of colonialism, postcolonial state power, and the spectatorship of a global audience.

Naruse's analysis of The Tower and Mammon Inc. highlights certain differences in how individuals perceive the place of their career in their lives. She writes of the juxtaposition between the "glamorous" career trajectory of the architect Hijaz and his "spiritual struggles living as a minoritized Malay Muslim man", while walking up the stairs of his 200-floor masterwork along the clerk Ilham. In the satirical Mammon Inc., Naruse examines the reconciliation between the values of the protagonist Chiah Deng with the corporate capitalism of the eponymous company Mammon Inc., justified through the "neoliberal morality", to quote sociologist Teo You Yenn, necessary for her to support her family. Mammon Inc. is placed alongside Conversations of Coming Home because of their shared presentation of undergraduate and graduate education as "temporally circumscribed but purposeful", of being abroad as "youthful" and a return to Singapore as the site of maturation as individuals assume the responsibility of caring for aged family members. Such responsibility is invariably entwined with the notion that Singapore is one's true "home", famously captured in Kit Chan's 1998 song 'Home'. Troy Chin's The Resident Tourist, by contrast, inverts the seeming touristic gaze imposed by Conversations of Coming Home by returning Singaporeans, as Chin tells a "life story that is not employed according to a career telos" while seeking "consensus with the state". Naruse's analysis provides a clarity not only to such literary representations, but also to the prevailing frameworks that have accompanied me as I have observed the migrations and decisions of my peers in their 20s, each negotiating pressures and commitments that are invariably under the shade of a neoliberal Global Asia that Naruse describes.

The introduction of narratives juxtaposing the experiences of Singaporeans, as well as migrant workers to Singapore, primarily domestic workers, further highlights Naruse's originality with the materials she sources. While Ilo Ilo is perhaps the more obvious choice of text to be examined in a study on Singaporean texts, Maid to Made is a fascinating example of the collapsing of the conventional divide between feminised domestic labour and corporate capitalist labour. In Ilo Ilo, Naruse suggests that the Filipina domestic worker Terry is "better able to navigate the changes in Singapore's economy than her Singaporean employers as the more cosmopolitan subject", finding a side job as a hairdresser and commanding fluency in English. By contrast, her employer Teck is unable to find a job despite years of experience in sales due to his low proficiency in English, while Hwee experiences a precarious "secretarial position at a shipping company", the outcomes of Singapore's ongoing industrialisation. Despite the fact that the film, as Naruse suggests, highlights that the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis is a "pivotal moment in differentiating transnational labor and the impossibility of political solidarity in the Southeast Asian region", Chen's depiction of Terry as mobile and enterprising refutes common unflattering depictions of migrant labour. However, this still remains within the confines of the state's economic agenda, allowing for the continuation of a labour differentiation that denies the possibility of a coalition politics across national and class lines.

However, Maid to Made seems to take this presentation of Terry as a transnational and resourceful subject to its real-life conclusion: the book's author Bustamante narrates her journey from working as a maid in Singapore to founding the business Chaire Associates and serving as president of the Asian CEO Awards. Bustamante describes taking classes at the Singapore Institute of Management on her single day-off a month. In her analysis, Naruse addresses this as Bustamante's perception of her "time in Singapore as disciplined", amidst time constraints and socioeconomic immobility. On her return to the Philippines and establishment of her entrepreneurial endeavours, Bustamante seeks to combat negative perceptions of the Philippines by promoting "the Philippines as a premier business destination to global decision makers", a similar strategy to Singapore's courting of foreign investment. Naruse highlights that while such a bootstraps narrative might seem like "generalized neoliberal delusion", it also reflects an "assimilation of Singaporean state economic doctrine". Naruse's analysis of such material portends the possibility of engagement with other literary and academic work examining the frames of postcolonial capitalism and neoliberalism within Asia broadly – Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, the scholarly work of Neferti X. M. Tadiar, or even the Get Lucky series of Singaporean and Philippine writings.

In her examination of Crazy Rich Asians, Naruse studies the formation of a different kind of transnational subjectivity. Herein is where Naruse is able to most clearly draw out resonances, contrasts and linkages between Asian American and Singaporean subjectivity formation, a transpacific study through the lens of Crazy Rich Asians' subjects. It is an inversion of sorts, with Chinese American Rachel Chu emblematising "US Decline", whereas Nicholas Young and the assortment of characters that surround him represent, if not an ascendant Asia, than a dynamic one. Naruse begins her chapter through an instance of orchid diplomacy, in which she sees the Dendrobium Barack and Michelle Obama, gifted to the President and his wife in 2016 to commemorate 50 years of relations between the US and Singapore, as representing a heteronormative romantic relation. It is a cross-breed between the Dendrobium Pink Lips, native to Hawaii and euphemistically feminised, and the Dendrobium Sun Plaza, a hybrid native to Singapore that Naruse sees as masculinised. Naruse traces back a history of gender rhetoric to characterise the dynamics between Singapore and the US (or metonymically "the West") to Lee Kuan Yew's critique of America's social dysfunction, with the discourse of "Asian Values" providing a robust counterweight.

With the waning of Asian Values discourse after the Asian Financial Crisis, Naruse suggests that to look to Crazy Rich Asians is to examine culturalist difference through a post-Asian Values prism at a time of Singaporean economic improvement and relative decline in the US. The generic definition that Naruse offers is that of the "princess fantasy". She defines it as such:

the princess's power derives from her ability to attract and draw male subjects to her. The fantasy of being treated like a princess also suggests a desire for fantastical experiences of luxury, indulgence, and extravagance, for a Prince Charming to swoop in and save one from the doldrums or difficulties of one's life. The princess fantasy feels empowering insofar as the princess has all her material desires fulfilled by her ability to attract, but the patriarchal structure remains.

Such a masculinity, in Naruse's formulation, is a "deracinated, 'not quite' Asian masculinity", one in which the histories of racial dynamics are still operative. In this case, the West is represented by Chinese American Rachel Chu while Nicholas Young is an embodiment of Singapore or Global Asia. Naruse suggests that Kevin Kwan's novel offers a counternarrative to orientalist depictions of Asian female subservience. Unlike the notion of the "porno-tropics", in which Asian lands are feminised for colonial acquisition and domination, Singapore is described with a masculinised authority: it has a "pulsating energy", possesses a "dense metropolis of skyscrapers" and is represented through decadent feasting at Lau Pa Sat. Through projections of metaphors of colonial adventurers in the Western Sahara, described similarities to Takeshi Kaneshiro in a Wong Kar Wai film, and mentions of British education, Naruse recognises the entwining of different forms of colonial masculinity in the Singaporean Nick himself. Nick is "the attractive Asian" who "does not ostentatiously perform dominant culture", a kind of "transcendence of Asiatic race". One is reminded of the suspicion surrounding the casting of Henry Golding, who is of English and Iban descent, allowing him to pass ambiguously as Chinese while retaining a supposedly broad appeal across Asian, American and European audiences.

Naruse's analysis of Singapore's depiction in Crazy Rich Asians also, invariably, activates discourses of consumerism, Eucocentricism and morality. The state ceases to be restrictive or determinative, but "people are able to fully experience and express an array of emotions", contrary to conventional perceptions of Singaporean sterility. Kwan stresses the anthropological nature of his novel, asserting that very little of the novel is fictitious while dramatising Singapore's modernisation and economic ascension through "general difference and familial tensions". Characters such as Nick and his cousin, the fashion designer Astrid, demonstrate mastery over the "codes of Western culture", while the novel's prologue features the novel's iconic scene of the Young family purchasing a hotel in England. The reinstallation of Eurocentricism functions as a conduit of power and manoeuvrability under the "long durée of capitalism". As Naruse argues, "contemporary remarks on the representational politics of historical time emphasize coexistence with the West and perform a decolonial move even as it is, in this instance, in the service of global capitalism."

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Kwan's emphasis on setting rather than character development. If one of Kwan's more grating tendencies is the decadence of his descriptive prose, Naruse takes this as Kwan's way of both resisting the "assimilatory pressures of the Western gaze" and "attracting it", rejecting a "[capitulation] to the Western gaze's demand for likeness". Naruse cites Anne Anlin Cheng's notion of "ornamentalism", or the process that renders Asia as ornament, as consonant with Kwan's descriptive style. Examining the precision of the arrangement of the Youngs' home, "the art deco divans with shantung silk ottomans, the tuxedo-clad piano player next to the batik-wearing servers, the Qianlong porcelain alongside opaline glass", signify "an organizing logic whereby wealth is able to overcome cultural difference". This does, however, contrast against the gaudiness of the Peiks' home with its "frescoed replica of Fragonard's The Swing" and "two versions of the Venus de Milo", which "signify wealth through the mindless accrual of Western objects, which in turn reveals an inferiority complex with respect to the West". Naruse's analysis is incisive and revealing of the continued functioning of Eurocentricism located within a brief history of postcolonial capitalism, the manipulation of pleasure operating as a means of accumulating capital.

Crazy Rich Asians serves as the strongest anchor for Naruse's thesis regarding Global Asia and its function in the imaginary of the transpacific. Naruse describes its depiction of Singapore as "an affective refuge from US histories of racialization" as well as "an accommodation of the Asian American gaze". The fact that a film set in Singapore could function as a "terra nullius" for the playing out of Asian American fantasy suggests to Naruse the "power of Singapore's anglophonic legibility" and therefore "desirability", evidence of Singapore being "not that different" from Asian America. It is here that I am reminded of the Singaporean response to the Asian American response towards Crazy Rich Asians that "Singapore is not your Wakanda!" Naruse describes this as "an inter-imperial, transpacific coherence of sinocentricism", yoking Chinese privilege in Singapore with "Chinese American representational hegemony in the Asian American context", evading moves towards assimilation or resistance commonly figured in Asian American literature and literary criticism, as described by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

To Naruse, this is revealing of the Singaporean state's "work to craft its dehistoricized and decontextualized Global Asia image" which "now has transpacific affective investments, further entrenching and exceeding a state-produced dominant narrative". The possibilities of Asian Americans, or more specifically Chinese Americans, finding themselves at home and affirmed in Singapore portends well for the possibilities of American capital seemingly finding itself comfortably situated in Singapore. This is a return to the beginning of Naruse's argument concerning Singaporean anxieties in presenting itself as sufficiently "Asian" – it is "Asian enough", diverse and cosmopolitan, yet also flattened in such a way that is hospitable to various peoples. Naruse argues that for this reason, it is almost inconceivable that Crazy Rich Asians was set in other Global Asia sites such as Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur or Seoul.

Naruse's careful and creative weaving and handling of various text forms charts a robust history of the forces and decisions that have facilitated Singapore's transformation into Global Asia, a short history that encapsulates the entirety of my life in Singapore, while providing discomfiting suggestions with regard to the choices I have made educationally, literarily and vocationally. Becoming Global Asia is Naruse's contribution to Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder's call to be "neither simply for nor against postcolonialism" and instead to "think with and beyond postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity". As "the postcolonial is becoming increasingly appropriated and exploited for capital gain," Naruse writes, "we must revise, expand, and multiply our notions of what postcoloniality looks like."

The stakes of Naruse's argument will continue to make themselves evident amidst the various transformations that Singapore has undergone in the aftermath of COVID-19. Singapore has become a new hotbed and beneficiary of Chinese capital flight and the establishment of family offices, carefully positioning itself as a gateway to East and Southeast Asia markets. It has pushed towards serving as a platform for conferences and events. These developments have made the realities of globalisation and pressures on living costs palpable each day. Capital accumulation as a means of retaining agency and adaptability remains embedded in the mindsets not only of the state but many who have established their professional lives in Singapore. Aesthetics and politics necessarily come together in Naruse's analysis, which will continue to have implications on the ways that literary production will continue in Singapore.

Becoming Global Asia helps to set new pathways for Singapore studies, especially in literature, and one wonders how Naruse's framework can help provide directions for fruitful analysis of a broader array of subjects – as the backdrop against which Singapore's 1990s anglophone poetry revival occurred, or the 2010s proliferation of poetry through the online activities of SingPoWriMo, or the development of the oeuvres of Balli Kaur Jaswal and Jee Leong Koh, or the phenomenon of young Singaporean anglophone writers casting their ambitions towards American or British publishing centres and reading audiences. The same can be said, of course, as an Asian American and Singaporean, for the trajectory of my own writing as well.

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