Mirrors and Windows: Exploring 'The Other' in Literature

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About the Programme:

There is “us” and there is “them”, and between these two concepts, the line that divides families, communities, and countries. So, what happens around this dividing line? This talk, with plenty of opportunities for speaker-audience interaction, will explore what the “Other” means in literature.

Those brief flashes of empathy, the perils of the lens of “Otherness”, how perfect unity sounds like a delusion, how the “outsiders”’ wretchedness lies in the inability to find a new world, and how, finally, the dividing line at times seems to be transcribed within and we appear as strangers, even to ourselves. This and more will be discussed from perspectives that range from Philip Larkin’s to Arthur Yap’s, from Edwin Thumboo’s to Albert Camus’.

The speakers will share important tips on writing the “Other” in fiction—possible faux pas in terms of appropriation, essentialising, and presenting falsely unifying rubrics or invented collective identities. There will also be a brief unveiling of Nilanjana Sengupta’s new work of fiction on Otherness.

This programme is part of the NAC-NLB Writers' Lab.

About the Speakers:

Nilanjana Sengupta, author and community historian, is based in Singapore and a recent participant in an advanced writing programme with Oxford.

Her book, The Votive Pen: Writings on Edwin Thumboo, was shortlisted for both the Singapore Literature Prize and Singapore Book Award. Her latest book, Chickpeas to Cook & Other Stories, dwells on the lives of women from some of the micro-communities of Singapore. Her other books include A Gentleman’s Word, The Female Voice of Myanmar, and Singapore, My Country.

Sengupta’s books have been critically acclaimed, adopted for university courses, and translated into multiple languages. She has been associated with the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute as well as NUS in various research capacities, and her overarching research interest is the feminist awakening in Southeast Asia, cultural exchanges between Asian nations, and questions of integration, identity, and hybridity of borrowed cultures.

Angus Whitehead is a lecturer at the National Institute of Education and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His publications include a collection of essays on William Blake; a collection of Anglophone Singapore literature; an essay on performance artist Peaches Nisker; and two on William and Catherine Blake’s letters.

Angus’ research focuses on archival recovery of the immediate social and historical contexts within which William and Catherine Blake lived and worked; George Chapman; Thomas Middleton; sexualities in contemporary millennial Singapore poetry and homosocial metaphor, wit and allusion in the songs of Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, Julian Cope, and Mark E. Smith.