Justin Tiang’s design for the cover of this e-magazine is a striking visual meditation on the theme for this issue of Margins: “A New World.” We join a party of travellers poised on the cusp of discovery. In the background, behind a mysterious glimmer, looms a fortified metropolis, perched atop a colossal obsidian plinth. An apparent techno-natural marvel, the distant city’s smooth geometry counterpoints the primordial, organic textures of geologic and floral outgrowth in the foreground. Here, our travellers find themselves on the brink of something erstwhile unthought and unencountered. One of them holds a map (see Fig. 1); the texturing of new experience into new knowledge has begun.
Fig. 1. Detail of cover art.
But is there ever such a thing as “new knowledge”? The world into which our travellers journey is irrevocably novel, yet also strangely familiar. The gestalt of the city’s striking figure recalls ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats or acropolises. At the same time, the fog and mist shrouding the city, as well as its apparent confluence of greenery and technology put one in mind of the Cloud Forest at Gardens by the Bay or the Shiseido Forest Valley at Jewel—icons much closer to home. Concomitantly, the wilderness through which the travellers have come evokes a kind of tropical lushness—albeit one from which we remain somewhat estranged. Is that a bird-sized bug in the extreme foreground? Is it hunting that (bug-sized) bird? Perspective changes everything, and no assumptions escape scrutiny as the known and unknown coalesce. Indeed, Tiang’s medium and genre—digital painting and science fiction—are themselves part of a matrix of long-established but dynamic technical conventions and iconological conversations. The work, then, may introduce us to a new world, but its own apparent newness is invariably caught up in a delicate dance with manifold sinews of the old. In this dance, the work performs this issue’s initial foray into the themes and epistemes that might colour “A New World.”
Behind its cover, “A New World” collects three academic essays, two book reviews, and two creative pieces which, like our cover artwork, interrogate the idea of “newness” via engagements with matters of literary form, identity politics, andcritical method, among other things. Building on the discourse of interpenetrated voices, methodologies, and disciplinary paradigms, the issue presents its works in such a manner that their organisation is its own essay on how, perhaps, to get to thinking about newness. By leveraging the logic of narrative for its presentation of largely critical writing, the reader’s engagement with the issue becomes, to an extent, a journey. To and from where exactly remain up for debate, but this is a journey most definitely to some semblance of the new. This device of journey and mobility becomes especially poignant in our current climate mired in a mix of actual, metaphorical, and metaphysical stops and starts: border closures and asylum-seeking emigration; the rhetoric behind talk of “lockdowns” and the criticism of “shifting goalposts”; the multi-level stagnation that comes with fear-induced paralysis and, with calamity after calamity, the continuous, flighty deferment of hope.
Unsurprisingly, then, “A New World” emerges as our attempt at a critical response to the ambivalence of novelty which has, as a concept, surfaced forcefully in various ways over the past two years, not in the least because of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. The phrase “new normal,” for instance, has in the desperate wake of the pandemic come to infect the lexicons of both political and everyday speech. One of the earliest recorded uses of “new normal” in Singapore vis-à-vis the pandemic comes from a Channel News Asia article from earlier in February, 2020, addressing community restriction measures to be installed in the interest of public health (Ahmad, "COVID-19"). Yet the phrase and the force of its expression is, as one might expect, far older. First recorded usage attributes the phrase to American inventor Henry A. Wise Wood’s reflection upon the state of world history, where after the First World War he asks, “should the new normal be shaped to differ from the old?” (Wise Wood 604–5) It would then emerge subsequently in the midst of four global crises—the Dot-Com bubble of the 1990s, the 2005 avian influenza, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Sino-American political crises of 2012—before presently falling bitterly on our tongues.
Within the context of our reflection upon how literary study might lend itself to explorations of newness, we note that “new normal” emerged in English literature most significantly through Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). In Heinlein’s novel, the phrase was used by its speaker not only to denote novel circumstances but to inspire hope. Heinlein’s novel describes a lunar colony’s attempts to secede from terrestrial imperialism—as it were an attempt by the people of the Moon to escape the gravitational pull of Earthly politicking. In an inspired speech, restless lunar colonists are besought by their fellow citizen to “comply willingly; it will speed the day when I can bow out and life can get back to normal—a new normal, free of the Authority, free of guards, free of troops stationed on us, free of passports and searches and arbitrary arrests.” (Heinlein #) The citizen’s impassioned plea expresses his exasperation, but also his hopes for the colony’s and his return to a preconceived normalcy, comfort, and stability. It captures the underlying tenor of the phrase as we understand it now—to say nothing of its unsettling resonance with the susurrations of socio-political discontent that have emerged as a result of pandemic-inspired community control measures. But more importantly, the phrase’s deployment in Heinlein’s novel underscores the sheer paradox of what is being hoped for. What is “a new normal”? How can the oxymoronic phrase make sense?
As we in Singapore envision a shift towards thinking of Covid-19 as endemic, we realise that “new normal” does not in fact make sense. Commentators have criticised the phrase for, among other detriments, its flattening effect. For instance, World Economic Forum writer Chime Asoyne’s asserts that “‘new normal’ discourse sanitizes the idea that our present is okay because normal is regular”; that it relies on language which works actively yet insidiously to obscure the very much abnormal reality of the mid- or post-crisis situation (Asoyne, "There's nothing new"). The point we take from Asoyne’s argument is that what should really be called for is a way of future living that makes no illusions about returning to any previous, likely imaginary idyll, nor of importing said (fantasies of) normalcy into the present. The broader point we take is, in so many words, a call to divorce our grips on the false promises that both “new” and “normal” separately describe. “New,” for all its optimism, abrades the future into egregiously unrealistic and unattainable aspirations; “normal” pretends that the post-crisis era will return unproblematically to the conditions of the past. Taken as a whole, then, “new normal” evades a positive investment in what presently is, and is thus potentially a witches’ brew of misdirection. We must allow for our anticipations and hopes, certainly, but we ought perhaps to hope with a reflexivity garnered only by being present. After all, the future, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reminds us, “cannot wipe the slate of the past. History haunts even those who refuse to learn history.” (#) This clarity would be the underlying spirit needed to dare a truly new world.
As we trudge forward through the troubles of our time, be it Covid-19 or a wider topography of uncertainty, the vicissitudes of reading and criticism then become incisive metaphors for our ongoing encounters with the new, the unknown, and the unpredictable. In this spirit, the reflections on the trespasses of reading that follow, the diverse experiments with how to encounter and embody newness collected in this issue, finally urge a shift in discussions about confronting the uncertainty which necessarily attending newness, that is, from how to survive to how to survive ethically.
Introducing the issue, Allison Hoe’s “Hellenism in Hebraic Obedience: The Prerequisite for Christian Mystery” juxtaposes two seemingly incommensurate worldviews familiar to Western culture and, in staging their confluence through a reading of Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back” (1965), thrusts us into the unfamiliar epistemic territory between them. Hoe’s essay mounts an inquiry into the ontology of faith and the mysterious tension between spiritual and material aspects of human life. It queries how reconciliation may be achieved between the flexibility of openness and the steadfastness of belief, ultimately probing the ways in which openness is the precondition of belief.
Conversely, Tan Wei Lin’s book review, “The Tedious Pleasure of Mishima Yukio’s Spring Snow,” engages with stubbornness—specifically, what he thinks of as the stubbornness of Mishima’s writing towards a reader’s attempts at appreciation. Tan considers how the tedium of Mishima’s Spring Snow (1972) ultimately precipitates a kind of enjoyment, in the process eliciting the reader’s critical engagement with certain aspects of Japanese culture and history. Perhaps the most fascinating quality of the review is its author’s self-reflexive engagement with his text. Tan’s reflections on a book that first exhausts him, as if by way of later exciting him, sensitises us to how a significant component of literary criticism begins with a reader’s powerful affective reaction to a given text and its idiosyncratic modes of expression and representation.
Where our earlier movement from Hoe’s essay to Tan’s review facilitates a shift towards a nascent idea of world literature, Darcel Anastasia Al Anthony’s poem, “The Princess,” pointedly refutes the ease of any such emigration into new cultural worlds. Anthony’s free verse interrogates matters of tradition and its subversion insofar as these relate to a particular conception of arranged marriages in Indian culture. Her postulations concern the possibilities and impossibilities of tentative and ultimately futile (female) poiesis—that is, creation, in the root sense of the term—within the rigid frameworks of established cultural paradigms. In this sense, the poem’s exploration is an aesthetic and creative venture that reiterates ever-important criticisms about the traps and mires devised by seemingly ineradicable patriarchal structures, power inequities, heteronormativity, and to some extent the postcolonial condition.
Arriving now at a pair of Dan N. Tran’s contributions, we find the postcolonial condition is also the axis around which these essays orbit. With the essay “My Wounded Body is Yellow,” any still-remaining utopic fancies behind ideas of new worlds are all but abandoned. Tran’s exploration about how old prejudices reincarnate in apparently new internationalist semiotics—particularly in relation to discourses of colour—tinges our view of the possible new world with the (East) Asian individual’s experience of multifaceted marginalisation. This new world is one which, according to Tran, is ultimately in the vice-grip of Western new media and its essentialising gaze. Tran’s essay focuses keenly on how peoples of East Asian descent might “contest and resist meanings of yellow that are still very much centred around a Euro-American epistemology.” He makes this argument via recourse to an unprecedentedly diverse archive of materials which itself instigates fresh thought about the semiotics of racial identity across cultural forms. The author’s multimedial analysis of films, magazines, and comics effects new ways of reading and thinking about what constitutes a literary “text.”
Tran’s inter-medial practice is carried forward with his review of the Taschen Ren Hang (2019), the recently published photographic portfolio of the eponymous artist. While we find ourselves returning to the familiar tactility of the book and the page, the reading Tran undertakes in this case is not merely of images but of bodies as well. Tran’s continued concern is with minority identities, but “minority” now expands to encompass, beyond peripheral identities, peripheral textual forms. In this respect, Tran’s review poses metacritical questions about the morphology of reading: we are asked to consider what it would mean to read the body—and then not merely the human body, but also the body of the book. Tran’s review juxtaposes the ideological processes which construct both biological and textual bodies by foregrounding their debt to the racial and the national from which there seems no escape. In his reading, Ren Hang’s otherwise ingenuous explorations of human sexuality are reformulated by the Taschen publication into pointed explorations of Chinese sexuality. Interrogating what we might call the politics of legibility, Tran meditates on how ideological agendas—at times implicit, at times explicit, but always looming over any act of reading—machinate the inclusion or exclusion of meanings which influence identity politics in fashions progressive or regressive but never neutral.
Likewise, Timothy Wan’s “‘Miller’s Turn’: Foundations for Too-Close Reading in Place for Us” mobilises arguably non-standard methodologies in literary criticism to discover a means by which queer subjectivities might enter critical discourse and thus signify in ways that speak to their decidedly peripheral lived experiences. Wan reflects upon the biases and blindness we risk when engaging with texts from the critical distance of close reading. He forwards D. A. Miller’s “too-close reading” as a means towards political restitution by aligning the mobilisation of Miller’s queer methodology with that of queer identities and lived experiences, against what Wan argues is the “heteronormative” precondition of New Criticism and its cherished close reading. Wan finally advocates for Miller’s methodologies as being able to give voice to peoples of the margins and peripheries—in this case, the queer community.
Continuing Wan’s self-reflexive engagement with reading, the issue concludes with a return to Tan’s exquisite writing, this time through his short story, “Yanagiba Kuchibiru and the Disappearing Village.” In so many words, “Yanagiba” is frustrating, complex, and meddlesome, but these apparent shortcomings are really the result of what one intuits to be Tan’s precise calibrations, and thus truly the story’s strengths. “Yanagiba’s” stake in the present issue’s essai on newness avails in its parody of academia and criticism. The unaware and self-involved, pseudo-academic protagonist Bosozuke Chintaro is put up as a fetish of critical self-indulgence. Through Chintaro and through unabashed punning, Tan self-deprecatorily asks who, if indeed anyone at all, has the right to infer and then interpret. For Tan executes the metacriticisms of “Yanagiba” through the surreal interstice between Japanese folklore and academia, we readers of the present issue finally find ourselves, at the end of our journey into newness, thrust awkwardly in a space neither here nor there and left thusly stranded.
By its final page, “A New World” rallies a diversity of literary thought at the boundaries of the undergraduate literary classroom. We find ourselves in possession not of a map toward any one sort of new world, but an intimating sketch of its myriad possibilities—a sketch which is concomitantly frank about the uncertainties any foray into novelty must confront. What is finally missing from “A New World” is therefore the silent question mark at the end of the phrase. For all we can conclusively know of any form of newness is that any hope entailed is necessarily underwritten by the unknowable and the unpredictable; the inescapable spectre of Murphy’s Law. Ultimately, the point of the issue is not to offer any sort of roadmap into whatever future lies ahead. Rather, our purpose is to offer specific directions on how to get lost, and then a reminder to enjoy it.
Works Cited
Ahmad Zaki Abdullah. 2020. “COVID-19 to Have ‘significant’ Impact on Economy: PM Lee
Hsien Loong.” Channel News Asia, 14 February 2020. https://www.channelnewsasia.com
Asonye, Chime. 2020. “There’s Nothing New about the ‘New Normal’. Here’s Why.” World
Economic Forum. 5 June 2020. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/theres-nothing-
Robert A., Heinlein. 1975. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. New York, NY: Berkley.
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. 1999. The Cycles of American History. Boston: Mariner.
Wise Wood, Henry A. 1918. “Beware!” National Electric Light Association Bulletin 5: 604–5.
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