Mekong Review

Category: Singapore

Just transitions

Kadal Jesuthasan

Climate activists are still stumped by the question of how to ensure that public power results in real, meaningful change. At the same time, the climate movement is setting its sights further than ever.

Art as catalogue

Jonathan Victor Baldoza

What unfolds in Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book is Shubigi Rao’s documentation of her encounters with texts in varying formats that, at some point in the past, confronted ‘banishment’.

Public noise

Mikko Toivanen

Noise can be a powerful tool of protest but also healing, its cathartic value directly correlated with its loudness.

Sea change

Darren Wan

What sets Rachel Heng’s historical fiction apart is how she moves beyond this understanding of History (with a capital H) by showing how grand events are mediated by everyday interactions.

What we see

Stephanie Chok

In Now You See Us, Balli Kaur Jaswal has created a social world that magnifies the indignities and frustrations of everyday life as a migrant domestic worker in Singapore.

Apathy and nonchalance

Loh Pei Ying

This could be After The Inquiry’s intention: to rile us up and stir a sense of indignation at a system in which the truth might not win out over politics and power

Sporting attitude

Kirsten Han

Could distance runner Soh Rui Yong’s absence from Singapore’s national team point to something bigger about how things work? He thinks this could be a “good opportunity” to ask questions.

Operation Corporate

Salil Tripathi

What Philip J. Stern offers is a reflection on the nature of power—how organisations created to share risks and raise capital for economic activities ended up becoming a dominant force.

Merantau

Daryl Qilin Yam

Queer Southeast Asia provides a multifaceted mosaic of the region, stretching for all to see the complexities that will always simmer beneath the volume’s name.

Who is Auntie?

Kirsten Han

In Ajoomma, a Singaporean-South Korean co-production directed by He Shuming, an auntie travels to South Korea to visit the shooting locations of her favourite K-dramas… but gets far more than she’d bargained for.

Sexy and Merlion-free

Linda Collins

Eighteen Singaporean poets write with a refreshingly mawkish-free assurance about crises of identity, neo-colonialism, the place of LGBTQ people in society and mummy-daddy issues in New Singapore Poetries, edited by Marylyn Tan and Jee Leong Koh.

Tending to wounds

Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman

Remembrance of indigenous histories and erasure is painful. But to remember politically and ethically, despite the ways memory has been dismissed or commodified, is to be hopeful and future-focused. Nabilah Husna on the power of indigenous memory.

Knowing and embodying

Faris Joraimi

Due to an outward appearance of bloodless harmony, the experience of racism in Singapore is akin to background noise that only minorities can hear. A review of Brown Is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore, edited by Kristian-Marc James Paul, Mysara Aljaru and Myle Yan Tay.

Do you love books?

Toh Ee Ming

A profile of Kenny Chan, who worked at Books Kinokuniya from 2001 to 2019. Today, he continues to roam the aisles of the flagship Singapore store, and talks to Toh Ee Ming about his enduring love of reading.