Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History◎Alfian Sa’at, Faris Joraimi, Sai Siew Min (Editors)
平常價 $33.00Why did independent Singapore celebrate two hundred years of its founding as a British colony in 2019? What does Merdeka mean for Singaporeans? And what are the possibilities of doing decolonial history in Singapore? Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History presents essays by historians, literary scholars and artists which grapple with these questions. The volume also reproduces some of the source material used in the play Merdeka / 獨立 / சுதந்திரம் (Wild Rice, 2019). Taken together, the book shows how the contradictions of independent nationhood haunt Singaporeans' collective and personal stories about Merdeka. It points to the need for a Merdeka history: an open and fearless culture of historical reckoning that not only untangles us from colonial narratives, but proposes emancipatory possibilities.
Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore◎Kristian-Marc James Paul, Mysara Aljaru, Myle Yan Tay (Editors)
平常價 $28.00Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore responds to, expands on and questions what we think we know about the lived experiences of minority-raced people in Singapore. Inspired by Brown Is Haram, a performance-lecture on minority-race narratives staged at The Substation in 2021, this anthology reflects on how brownness is constructed, sidelined, but also celebrated in this nation-state. Through a combination of essays, academic works, poems, and stories by brown individuals, Brown is Redacted both attempts to and fails to create a singular brown experience. What this anthology does produce instead, is a moving and expressive work of solidarity and vulnerability.
"Brown is Redacted is an incredible and much-needed collection of work that challenges preconceived notions about state- and socially created categories. The works here interrogate the nature of identity, using the lenses of art, academia and personal experience and capturing the dreary pain of being othered as well as the powerful joy of being seen. The writers hold nothing back, offering their hurt, tenderly showcasing the beauty in the under-represented, and triumphantly celebrating individuality." —Akshita Nanda, co-winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in English Fiction
“Brown is Redacted, through its ambition and lyricism, liberates us from the multicultural straitjacket stitched in the 1960s. On every page is a voice that has risen from the interstices of overlapping traditions and generations. Together they lay bare the complexities of the brown experience: the rawness of the struggle, the absurdity of the ignorance, the radical agency of choice, the ecstasy of solidarity. We can transcend. To be brown in Singapore is to dance between anguish and joy.” —Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, Editor-in-Chief, Jom
Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore◎Esther Vincent Xueming, Angelia Poon (Editors)
平常價 $28.00Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore contemplates and re-centres Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology and nation. For the first time, this collection of ecofeminist essays focuses on the crafts, minds, bodies and subjectivities of a diverse group of women making kin with the human and non-human world as they navigate their lives.
From ruminations on caregiving, to surreal interspecies encounters, to indigenous ways of knowing, these women writers chart a new path on the map of Singapore’s literary scene, writing urgently about gender, nature, climate change, reciprocity and other critical environmental issues.
In a climate-changed world where vital connections are lost, Making Kin is an essential collection that blurs boundaries between the personal and the political. It is a revolutionary approach towards intersectional environmentalism.
Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene◎Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
平常價 $26.00In this era of climate crisis, in which our very futures are at stake, sustainability is a global imperative. Yet we tend to associate sustainability, nature, and the environment with distant places, science, and policy. The truth is that everything is environmental, from transportation to taxes, work to love, cities to cuisine.
This book is the first to examine contemporary Singapore from an ecocultural lens, looking at the ways that Singaporean life and culture is deeply entangled with the nonhuman lives that flourish all around us. The authors represent a new generation of cultural critics and environmental thinkers, who will inherit the future we are creating today. From chilli crab to Tiger Beer, Changi Airport to Pulau Semakau, O-levels to orang minyak films, these essays offer fresh perspectives on familiar subjects, prompting us to recognise the incredible urgency of climate change and the need to transform our ways of thinking, acting, learning, living, and governing so as to maintain a stable planet and a decent future.
The Singapore I Recognise: Essays on home, community and hope◎Kirsten Han
平常價 $29.00Singapore is small, a complex country full of contradictions, inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. Often held up as a model nation, we sometimes forget that Singapore is seen differently by different people. With a decade of activism and journalism experience, Kirsten Han reveals various aspects of her home country that don’t follow what many of us know as the conventional ‘Singapore Story’. The Singapore I Recognise is Kirsten’s reckoning with civil society’s experiences of Singapore, perspectives that are often unheard, or fall through the cracks. Through researched interviews and heartfelt reflections, Kirsten tells us how parts of Singapore are already moving towards communal care, solidarity, empowerment and hope. This is a resonant portrayal of home in the island city-state.
“If you live in Singapore, you know it is a place with more layers and complexities than meets the eye. Yet, it is not always possible to grasp what lies beneath the glossy stories of economic success, social harmony, and political stability. Kirsten Han’s book—part reflexive memoir, part incisive reporting—is an informative, nuanced, and deeply humane series of essays that helps us better understand and appreciate the contradictions, tensions, and power plays that are integral to the Singapore story. Read it to learn new things, read it to feel big emotions, read it to expand your thinking on the realities and possibilities of home.”
—Teo You Yenn, sociologist and author of This is What Inequality Looks Like
“When Kirsten Han sees something, she says something, especially when that something is an injustice that afflicts the weak in Singapore’s extremely privileged society. This book encapsulates the values she has fearlessly espoused for years, and for which she continues to pay a personal price. Unable to counter her arguments on the merits, the establishment has subjected her to smears and harassment. One day, her conscientious contributions will be lauded. Until then, Kirsten Han is the eye that too few in Singapore recognise. The country is blinder for it.”
—Cherian George, Author of Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited
This book contains descriptions of physical violence, mentions of incarceration and themes related to the death penalty, as well as references to arrests and interrogation. We recognise that the ways in which readers might respond to and deal with these issues may vary, as our relationships to these topics are unique. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, personally affected or unable to engage with this content at present, feel free to put this book down and talk to someone about how you feel, or consult the resources printed at the back.
The Sound of SCH: A Mental Breakdown, A Life Journey◎Danielle Lim
平常價 $20.00Can a life weave along through the same notes and yet come to play forth different sounds?
The Sound of SCH (pronounced S-C-H) is the true story of a journey with mental illness, beautifully told by Danielle Lim from a time when she grew up witnessing her uncle's untold struggle with a crippling mental and social disease, and her mother's difficult role as caregiver. The story takes place between 1961 and 1994, backdropped by a fast-globalising Singapore where stigmatisation of persons afflicted with mental illness nevertheless remains deep-seated. Unflinchingly raw and honest in its portrayal of living with schizophrenia, The Sound of Sch is a moving account of human resiliency and sacrifice in the face of brokenness.
Malayland◎Dina Zaman
平常價 $23.00What does it mean to be Malay in the 21st century? This question is especially relevant in a country like Malaysia, where identity politics is frequently highlighted and closely policed by the state. Sixteen years after the publication of I Am Muslim, Dina Zaman returns with her new memoir, Malayland, a reflection on what it means to be Malay and Muslim in 21st century Malaysia.
Dina embarked on Malayland during the Covid pandemic in an effort to understand the anger and frustrations of her fellow ethnic Malays who were fighting against enemies, real and imagined, and a new world order imposed by a virus that killed over seven million people globally. Growing up in a Malaysia where Malay anger seethed and bubbled under the many nightclubs in 1980s Malaysia–a time where secularism had putatively killed the Malay Muslim heritage–Dina traces the roots of contemporary radicalism to the 1998 Reformasi movement which set the nation on a new, more extremist path.
Today race and faith are discussed and embraced frenetically, where hateful extremism is hidden under the rhetoric of nationalism, where young Malaysians are zealously asserting their political and birth identities in social media. The sense of irony and humour that Malaysia was once known for is now perhaps irretrievably lost. Malayland is a reflective book: memories and flashbacks of a childhood filled with earthquakes, spooks and a sense of wonderment and curiosity about a country that is fighting for a desired identity.
About the Author
Dina Zaman is a Kuala Lumpur-based writer and researcher. She is the co-founder of IMAN Research, a think tank focusing on socio-political and security matters, and a founding member of the Southeast Asian Women Peacebuilders. She has written extensively for the Malaysian media and is a contributor to The Jakarta Post. Her latest passion projects revolve around Terengganu Royal History. Dina is the author of three non-fiction titles – I am Muslim (Silverfish Publishing), Holy Men, Holy Women (SIRD) and Malayland(Ethos/Faction) – and King of the Sea (Clarity Publishing) her collection of short stories.
【預購】AI時代的超級老人：爸媽老後長照靠AI，未來的你安心變老◎平松類（譯者：彭佳）
平常價 $31.00你或父母是否有這些擔憂？
Ownself Say Ownself: New & Selected Poems◎Joshua Ip
平常價 $28.00Ownself Say Ownself is a chaotic collection of new and selected poetry by Joshua Ip. Half of it is 44 poems salvaged from the award-winning, out-of- print wilderness of his first five-ish collections, marked-up with mischievous metric marginalia in the newly invented form of the tilde (tl;dr). The next half is 44 new translations, performance pieces and formal experiments written over the course of a practice research PhD. So you get the best of six-ish books for the price of one, which fortuitously sums to 88 poems.
See satirical singlish sonnets scrabble with spurned spoken word and shady pseudo-song-translations alongside snide summaries, split-screen cinemas, Song-dynasty susurrus, Scottish-civil-servant-salutations and circumlocutory sex scenes, in a singsong celebration of spurious sesquilinguality!
Singapore Is Still Not An Island◎Bilahari Kausikan
平常價 $36.00Retired Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan gives his perspectives on regional and global developments that pertain to Singapore’s foreign policy.
A first collection of essays and public speeches, covering the period from Singapore’s independence in 1965 to 2017, was published under the title Singapore Is Not An Island. This second collection of articles and speeches builds on this and covers events up to 2023.
Sharing his strategic insights through various essays, talks and papers, Bilahari shows why and how Singapore and Asean should navigate the new strategic environment. Global and regional issues are examined through the realistic lens of Singapore’s foreign policy interests.
AUTHOR
BILAHARI Kausikan
Bilahari Kausikan is currently Chairman of the Middle East Institute, an autonomous institute of the National University of Singapore. He has spent his entire career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During his 37 years in the Ministry, he served in a variety of appointments at home and abroad, including as Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Permanent Representative to the UN in New York and as the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry. Raffles Institution, the University of Singapore and Columbia University in New York all attempted to educate him.
EDITOR
TAN Lian Choo
A former award-winning journalist with The Straits Times, Tan Lian Choo joined the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1995, serving as then Ministry’s first Director of Public Affairs, Spokesperson for the Ministry and Press Secretary to the Foreign Minister. Her overseas diplomatic assignments included being Singapore’s Permanent Delegate to
Unesco in Paris (2007-2009), serving concurrently as Deputy Chief of Mission, Singapore Embassy in Paris (2006-2009). She was appointed Head of Mission, Singapore Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil (2012-2015). She retired from the Singapore Foreign Service in 2015.
Governing: A Singapore Perspective◎S.Jayakumar
平常價 $36.00Professor S. Jayakumar, a former minister, diplomat and law dean, shares his candid views on many facets of Singapore’s governance, including fascinating first-hand and behind-the-scenes accounts.
• On Lee Kuan Yew: first-hand recollections of events revealing the founding prime minister’s working style as well as his human side.
• On world leaders: his impressions of monarchs, prime ministers and ministers, with many of whom he developed close relations.
• On the relationships between the Government, Ministry of Law, Attorney-General’s Chambers and the Judiciary: how they interact in actual practice.
• On challenging legal issues, including: how Singapore should deal with issues such as the rule of law; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues; and tough penalties such as the death penalty and caning.
• On contemporary issues, including:
- Transition to 4G: should Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong review his handover timeline?
- General Election 2020: what are the scenarios which the election portends for Singapore’s future?
- Fight against COVID-19: was it a failure or a success story?
- Reserved Election of Presidency: was it justifiable or not?
The IRAS Story◎Ng Keat Seng, Lee Su Shyan
平常價 $44.00The IRAS Story chronicles how Singapore's tax authority evolved from the Singapore Income Tax Department set up in 1948 to administer income tax only, to the Inland Revenue Department that took charge of several taxes from 1960, and finally to the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore in 1992, a key national institution that the World Bank has cited as a model for tax administrations.
IRAS' people tell us their story. And it is a fascinating one, of coping with documents galore, irate taxpayers, fraud and tax evasion. But then, like a symphony that soars above the cacophony, the IRAS players put up a class act. It began using technology creatively to achieve one of the lowest costs of tax collection and highest rates of voluntary compliance in the world, and kept up the tempo by responding robustly to a global environment that is becoming more complex and less predictable.
Vintage Singapore - 1950s (Postcard Book)◎Singapore Post
平常價 $25.00Majulah Moments (Postcard Book)◎Singpost
平常價 $25.00Thinking Allowed?◎Warren Fernandez
平常價 $25.00Small States In A Big World : Size Is Not Destiny◎Tommy Koh (Editor)
平常價 $33.00Singapore Is Not An Island◎Bilahari Kausikan
平常價 $28.00As a small country in Southeast Asia seeking to survive and prosper, Singapore cannot be ordinary. It must be extraordinary. Herein lies the central challenge for Singapore in every area, including foreign policy. This book is a compilation of essays and public speeches by Bilahari Kausikan over the last 25 years. A frank and passionate assessment of the geopolitical realities to date, and the uncertainties that have emerged. It is for anyone interested to know about protecting Singapore’s interests, nicely or otherwise, in a rapidly changing and complex world.
About the Author
Bilahari P S Kausikan is a veteran Singapore diplomat who retired in 2013, after serving in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) for 32 years. He was Second Permanent Secretary and subsequently Permanent Secretary of MFA from 2001 to 2013. He is now Ambassador-at-Large. Bilahari is known nationally and internationally for his strategic analyses, and has a following in international foreign policy circles. He has also established a reputation in social media circles, especially among young Singaporeans.
Government in Business - Friend Or Foe? Finding Entry & Exit Points◎Lim Hwee Hua
平常價 $36.00Former Member of Singapore’s Parliament and top civil servant Lim Hwee Hua has used her active role in this perennial issue to show just how complex the arguments can be.
She answers a list of recurring questions, dealing with the why, when, what and wherefore which public officials, managers of state-owned enterprises and businessmen will find useful when formulating policies, or in their dealings with one another.
The numerous examples she cites from all over the world, of governments’ dreams and nightmares, illustrate factors peculiar to particular situations, but all raise degees of risk best resolved with honesty, particularly with regard to who benefits the most from a decision to get in or out. As Lim explains, the answer can sometimes come as a shock.
Malaysia & Singapore: The Land Reclamation Case◎Cheong Koon Hean, Tommy Koh, Lionel Yee
平常價 $28.00This book tells the story of Singapore’s first experience of defending its legal rights
before an international tribunal, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
(ITLOS).
The authors, who were part of the multidisciplinary and multi-agency team tasked
with presenting Singapore’s case at ITLOS, recount the facts of the reclamation
dispute and the ITLOS proceedings culminating in a pragmatic outcome, one that
paves the way for future cases of this nature to be resolved in a similar way. This
book would be of interest to students and readers of international relations,
international law and the peaceful settlement of disputes.
Close Watch : A Nation's Resolve To Secure Singapore◎Ben Nadarajan
平常價 $18.00Can Singapore Survive? (New Updated Version)◎Kishore Mahbubani
平常價 $39.00
However, the biggest danger Singapore faces is complacency. One key goal of this book is to encourage the development of such a culture of constant reflection and self-examination.
For young Singaporeans who never experienced third-world Singapore or direct contact with the great founding fathers of Singapore, these essays may provide a glimpse of the hard-headed thinking that also explains Singapore’s exceptional success over the years.
About the Author
Kishore Mahbubani has been the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore since August 2004. Before that, in his distinguished 33-year career as a diplomat, he served twice as ambassador to the UN. He has published a vast array of articles in leading global journals and newspapers, such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Financial Times, as well as four books: Can Asians Think, Beyond the Age of Innocence, The New Asian Hemisphere and The Great Convergence. He was listed by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 global thinkers in 2010 and 2011; and by Prospect magazine as one of the top 50 global thinkers for 2014.
America: A Singapore Perspective◎Tommy Koh, Saljit Singh (Editors)
平常價 $33.00Men in White◎Sonny Yap, Leong Weng Kam, Richard Lim (English)
平常價 $45.00Men In White is the inside story of one of the world’s most successful political parties. Narrated in three parts, it is oral history spun in a journalistic mode and spiced unapologetically with anecdotes, quotes and human interest to breathe life into past events.
Three writers from The Straits Times backed by four researchers conducted some 300 interviews in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong and China. The result is a dramatic account of the PAP – warts, blemishes and all – and of the pivotal moments in its history which changed the course of Singapore forever.
PART ONE tells how a Cambridge-educated lawyer and his anglicised associates collaborated with radical Chinese-speaking trade unionists to drive out the British colonialists and how they fought each other to the bitter end.
PART TWO captures the agonies of leadership renewal and charts the ascent of Goh Chok Tong who succeeded Lee as the second prime minister. It ends with Lee Hsien Loong taking over from Goh in 2004 and leading the party to victory in the 2006 polls.
PART THREE wraps up the PAP story by delving into the key principles that characterise Singapore governance and concludes with the intriguing poser: Will PAP outlive LKY?
