Book Launch: Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise

Professor Leow will be joined in a panel discussion by three fellow scholars:Professors Nadine Attewell, Nazry Bahrawi, and Cornel Bogle.

Drawing from a body of Anglophone and multilingual cultural texts created in contemporary Singapore and in its diasporic communities, Professor Leow's book proposes methods of cultural analysis and close reading that are “counter-cartographical”—reading in resistance to and yet pressed up against the regulations of a (post)colonial map. In a global political context that is increasingly marked by a return to authoritarianism, cultural production from Singapore provides an intense, microcosmic view of the conditions of art-making an overdetermined urban space, under duress and censorship.

Speaker Bios

Joanne Leow: Joanne Leow grew up in Singapore and lives on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair of Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her first academic monograph is Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool University Press, 2024). She is also a poet and writer with a debut collection of poetry, Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022). Her creative work and research lie at the intersections of the environmental humanities, transnational and diasporic cultural production, global Asia studies, autotheory, and decoloniality.

Nadine Attewell: Nadine Attewell is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, where she also directs the undergraduate program in Global Asia. She is the author of Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire (2014) and is currently at work on a second SSHRC-funded book entitled, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City. She has published articles in Postcolonial Text, topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures of the Americas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. She sits on the editorial board of Trans Asia Photography.

Nazry Bahrawi: Nazry Bahrawi is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian literature and culture at the University of Washington in Seattle. His current research examines the intersections between animal fables and racial discourses in Malay-Indonesian literary texts, films and visual art. He has published on racialism, folklore, literary Islam and translation as cultural rewriting in maritime Southeast Asia in relation to other Indian Ocean cultures and global Anglophone Muslim texts and films. Nazry has held visiting fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Brighton, UK's National Centre for Writing and the Toji Foundation in South Korea. He is an editor-at-large at Wasafiri literary magazine for international contemporary writing and serves as a member of the editorial team at Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature. As a literary practitioner, Nazry has translated Malay literary works to English and published short stories.

Cornel Bogle: Cornel Bogle writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of Black, Caribbean, and Canadian literatures; creative writing studies; auto/biography studies; postcolonial, black Atlantic, and diaspora studies; and critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. Cornel’s critical and creative writing has been published in Studies in Canadian Literature, University of Toronto Quarterly, sx salon, Canadian Literature, Arc Poetry Magazine, Moko, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Pree: Caribbean Writing, and Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies. Cornel also serves as an associate editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature.

Venue Accessibility:

The building is accessible at street level on the Hastings side or via a ramp on the Cordova Street Courtyard side. There are two ramp entry points, one is located against the building, near the entrance to the Woodward’s Westbank Atrium (which houses London Drugs and Nesters) and one is located against the building, beside the alley. Both the Hastings doors and the Cordova Courtyard doors can be operated by accessibility buttons located beside the doorways.

The building is accessible by several bus lines. Plan your trip with TransLink’s Trip Planner.

Metered street parking available and a number of parkades nearby.

Public bike racks are located near the Cordova entrance.

Public and gender-neutral washrooms are available. All public washrooms are equipped with wheelchair accessible stalls.