Monday 24 March 2026, 11:30am, on Zoom

What happens when Asian writers adapt Euro-American myths and literary classics? Are they imitating the West — or resisting it? This seminar introduces a third possibility: “writing through.” Leslie Wong explores how contemporary Asian literature reworks canonical Euro-American narratives without simply “writing back” to a former coloniser. Instead, he proposes “writing through” — a mode of postcolonial adaptation that syncretises Asian folklore, literature, and history with Euro-American cultural forms, moving beyond imitation or critique toward critical hybridity.

Focusing on Singaporean novels by women writers — The Gatekeeper by Nuraliah Norasid and The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey — Wong examines how these works reimagine figures such as Medusa and Victorian archetypes within colonial and quasi-fantastical Singaporean settings. Through what he terms the pluralising poetics of “writing through,” these texts decentre the West’s claim to universality without replacing it with a new nationalist hegemony.

Leslie Wong recently completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and is currently based in Singapore.

Discussant

Nazry Bahrawi (University of Washington)