Colleen Lye

Peripheral Realisms Now

Joe Cleary’s foreword to this issue in part tells the story of how the Cold War skewed the aesthetic valuation of twentiethcentury nonEuroAmerican literatures: it masked their diversity by partitioning a liberal modernism from a socialist realism and thus inclining postcolonial critics based in metropolitan institutions toward modernist criteria. Yet political nonalignment for the Third World writer in fact entailed an agnostic stance, with both modernist and realist forms usable for anticolonial expression. In revisiting the question of peripheral realism, this special issue thus reasserts the aesthetic range of nonEuroAmerican literary practice beyond that of conformity to an international modernist style and its offshoots (fabulism, oral literature, metahistorical allegory, magical realism). It seeks to restore to view the agency of the Third World writer freed from the role of repeating forms pioneered elsewhere in earlier times. Indeed, if our present situation allows for reconsidering the lively fate of realism in the peripheries of the twentiethcentury literary worldsystem — and with it the possible transcendence of the realism/modernism antinomy — then we are also once again forced to reckon with the obsolescence of the concept of the Third World today. Such a reckoning may broaden our historical perspective on what was Third World literature, but it also requires an appropriate caution about any replacement concept, including the notion of peripheral literature that organizes this special issue.

America's Asia

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Liberal Arts for Asians: A Commentary on Yale-NUS

This critical commentary discusses Yale-NUS College, a recently established liberal arts college in Singapore enabled by a controversial partnership between Yale University and the National University of Singapore. The Yale–NUS collaboration marks a shift in the role of educational institutions in Singapores neoliberal economy and one that contends with the legacy of Singapores earlier discourse of ‘Asian values’. The essay analyses the curricular design process of the colleges ‘literature and humanities’ common curriculum course, as well as one faculty members experience of teaching a course on modern Chinese literature and film, to highlight both the potential and the challenges of liberal arts education in the context of Singapores postcoloniality and neoliberal economy.