Monday, 3 March 2025, 8:00 PM SGT (12:00 pm UTC), via Zoom

This presentation explores the depiction of Singapore in Sandi Tan’s film Shirkers and its role in shaping an international image of the city. Through absence and silence, Shirkers crafts a nostalgic yet impossible vision of 1990s Singapore. More than a rediscovered indie film, it serves as a critical Singaporean text, illuminating creativity, censorship, and national representation issues. This seminar examines how Shirkers contributes to a cultural and spatial imagining of Singapore, situating it within broader discussions on film, nostalgia, and geopolitical perceptions of the city-state.

Sarah Alwin is a part-time PhD student in the School of English at The University of Sheffield and is writing about selected literary and filmic depictions of domestic spaces in Singapore and Malaysia from Somerset Maugham in the 1920s to Jeremy Tiang and Sharlene Teo in the present-day. Her work concerns the resonances of external social, historical, and political forces within the internal spaces of the home and their effects on those that populate these spaces.

Discussant

Kenneth Paul Tan, Hong Kong Baptist University

Organised in collaboration with

University of Sheffield, School of English