Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation

    I have the great fortune to lead a course in modern Southeast Asian Fiction in English this semester. This means that I get to read and critically evaluate a baker’s dozen of recent Southeast Asia-themed books, and also some classics. It’s a motley bunch, but it’s tremendous fun and I have learned a lot already.

    What’s more, this is a special opportunity to think about the intersection of political science, Southeast Asian studies, and literary fiction. I’ll use this space to write short reviews of these books from the perspective of an eager reader, someone who is not a literary critic but who wants to think expansively about new fiction in its historical, political, and transnational contexts.* There will be spoilers. Read on if you’re curious.

    Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation: Singaporean State-Building, Personified

    Rachel Heng‘s The Great Reclamation is a very enjoyable read. It is an engaging love story set in a time of great political and social change in Singapore. The book is well-crafted and easily digestible, written with a welcoming and engaging prose that can lead you to miss just how smart and evocative it is. Anyone who cares about Singapore, or who wants to read some historical fiction on decolonizing Asia, will enjoy this book.

    Spoilers from here on out. The Great Reclamation tells the story of a small fishing village in Singapore’s East Coast, located several kilometers from the urbanized center of late colonial Singapore. The central characters are fishermen and their families, Hokkien speakers who live a traditional lifestyle in their kampong (the Malay word for village**). The protagonist is Ah Boon: we meet him at the beginning of the book as a shy and nervous young boy whose father fishes for a living and whose older brother is set to follow in his footsteps. Ah Boon is fearful, not cut out for a hard life on the water, but early on—after being compelled to join a fishing trip with his father and brother—he discovers that he has an uncanny ability to detect islands off the coast that are invisible to others. These islands are not just magical, appearing and disappearing depending on who is looking, they are full of fish, which provide a rich bounty for Ah Boon and later for other villagers. Ah Boon’s discoveries make a hard life into a prosperous one, allowing his family and the villagers to fill their bellies, send their children to school to learn to write in Chinese, to purchase medicine to treat their basic ailments, and to live in some comfort as the world changes around them.

    Those changes around them are substantial. First comes the Japanese occupation during WWII, which brings tragedy and trauma to the family. Then comes the return of the British, then impending independence first with and then without Malaysia. Amidst all this, we watch Ah Boon grow up together with his friend Siok Mei, a fiercely independent young orphan whose parents had joined the nationalist revolution in China and perished. They are fast friends; Ah Boon pines over her, but his love is unrequited, as Siok Mei becomes increasingly engaged with the Singaporean labor movement that was aligned with socialist and communist forces around Asia. In the end Siok Mei marries someone else, and Ah Boon discovers Natalie, who works for the new independent government (who are called, in Hokkien, the Gah Men) in a field that might best be called “community development”. Under Natalie’s tutelage, Ah Boon becomes a government employee too, learning the educated version of Singaporean English, wearing a crisp white shirt in the cool air conditioning, and convincing his villagers to use a new community center and eventually to move into new government-constructed apartments (Singapore’s famous HDB flats). The former fishing village is demolished, to become East Coast Park.

    There’s a lot more to the story: the environment and the effects of development on the village community, the communist movement and the crackdown against it***, the legacies of wartime trauma for Ah Boon’s family, the twists and turns of Ah Boon and Siok Mei’s relationships with each other and with others. There is also a lot to say about the prose, the ways in which Heng evokes the sensory experience of things like food and sun and salt, the feel of slurping up steamed fish and greens and the sound of chopsticks clinking on ceramic bowls. But I’d like to pull on one specific thread, which is the larger meaning behind Ah Boon’s character in the context of a book about Singapore’s modernization.

    My question is, does Ah Boon represent Singapore itself? I think he does. Ah Boon is Singapore.

    Ah Boon is something of a magical character, someone who transforms traditionally minded people into modern citizens. It is he who discovered the hidden islands that made his village prosperous under the British. And it is he who could convince those villagers to embrace modernity after decolonization, to move into the HDB flats and to embrace the cement walls of the new community center. It is he who could teach those villagers to wipe their feet when coming inside to watch the TV, who would clean up after them to keep the public space presentable, and who could patiently listen to their anxieties over living on the fifth floor of a building. Ah Boon has some essence within himself that allows him to make progress against all odds. The through-line from shy boy to Gah Men is that Ah Boon is a low-key hero.

    In this, Ah Boon also represents Singapore’s best perception of itself, as a self-made society. He is not the wealthy kid; rather, he is a poor Hokkien boy who made his own way, from the bottom of the class hierarchy to a cozy place within the postcolonial administration. He works hard, and his life gets better as a result, as do the lives of those around him. He knows that some people don’t like how the government makes hard choices for the common good, but he believes that these things must be done and he does not spend too much time looking backwards. The last words of the book are absolutely on point:

    Ah Boon made it, and we root for him along the way. In true Singapore style, there are always costs to development and change, but as Ah Boon says, progress over stagnation. So, about the past: Bury it. Make it new again. He is cringe, but he is free.

    NOTES

    * What you read here are not just my own thoughts, but rather my thoughts in conversation with the student taking the course. That student will remain anonymous for now, unless they ask me to reveal their identity.

    * And, incidentally, the origin of the English word compound, in the sense of a fortified camp.

    ** Almost certainly this was a reference to Operation Coldstore.

  • Social Media and Coordination in the Political Science Public Sphere

    Inger Newburn recently shared a critical essay on the relationship between social media and academia in the current moment. Her points are important. Anyone who believes that the roughly decade-old consensus on public engagement and academic career building via social media still holds true ought to read it carefully.

    I have been thinking about how recent changes to the social media landscape have affected even passive users of academic social media. Because I am a political scientist, I notice the effects in particular on political science academia; as I will note below, I don’t think that this affects all disciplines equally, because different disciplines have different public profiles.

    But for now, focus on political science. My discipline has benefitted tremendously from social media over the past decade. Now think about what’s happened to Twitter under the Musk regime, and to sites like The Monkey Cage as legacy media continues to evolve. These are possibly related, although I’m not confident that I know how. Let’s consider each independently before putting them together.

    Twitter and the End of the Political Science Public Square

    The issue here is not whether it’s right or wrong to use Twitter, or if you should switch to some competitor (I’m tired of thinking about those questions, and I’m pretty sure no one cares about my own views or choices). People can make their own choices, and I bet Twitter is still great for non-professional, non-academic purposes. Use Threads if you want to train the algos on your Instagram and your takes at the same time. But, two things are true about Twitter for political science academia.

    1. Twitter’s decision to require users to login to see the full content makes it fundamentally different than it used to be. It’s no longer an open platform. You can’t share Twitter material with non-users seamlessly anymore. If I can’t paste a link to a full thread in an email and send it to my Twitter-free parents, then it doesn’t have the same value to me as it used to.*
    2. Lots of political scientists who used to use Twitter don’t use it anymore. They went elsewhere, or they went nowhere (like me), but the same content isn’t being generated on that specific platform. I emphasize that I’m not passing judgment on that. I am simply observing it as a fact about the world.**

    These two facts mean that Twitter is not longer the academic public square in the same way that it once was. Random people cannot dip into academic Twitter to learn what’s new. Knowing this, content generators don’t use it the same way. Political scientists used to coordinate on Twitter as the open platform to share new research, so others could use Twitter as the place to go to learn about new research. It’s no longer that.

    The Decline of the High-Profile Political Science Community Blog

    I don’t think that I know the full story of what happened to The Monkey Cage. Maybe no one does. But as Marc Lynch has observed, the end of TMC’s run at The Washington Post has left the discipline’s main public-facing blog in a difficult spot.

    There’s more to the story than just that, though. Prior to being absorbed into the WaPo ecosystem, TMC was a community blog lead by a small team of people who collectively wrote about what they thought was important about the intersection of the discipline, the public sphere, and research done by political scientists. I liked that version a lot, as did many others. Most posts were not meant for a general audience, but that was fine.

    Joining WaPo transformed TMC, and that was the point. TMC became more journalistic, snappier, less precise, more general. Headlines became grabby. Paragraphs got chopped into chunks that were two sentences long. Before long, it lost any specific relevance to the political scientist as a reader. After a couple of years, it felt like the audience was everyone but political scientists! No more commentary about methods, or disciplinary fads, or the latest scandals. It was where you went to write for the Acela Corridor audience, to demonstrate public engagement and impact.

    Although I missed the old TMC, these developments were nevertheless wholly positive. Having TMC at WaPo was great for academic political science. As TMC changed into something else, it filled a new role, and that role was important. I was sorry to read that WaPo dropped TMC, and it makes me especially sad for my outstanding colleagues in the Department of Government at Cornell (link, link) who worked tirelessly with TMC to bring political science to the public sphere.

    Coordination and the Public Square

    What these two changes have in common is that each has undermined a public institution that served an essential coordinating function for academic political science. Twitter was, for better or for worse***, where anyone could go to see most of the latest political science research. TMC was, again for better or for worse, the go-to place where people who wanted to contribute to public discussions could do so. In neither case were these the only platforms for public engagement—people still have RSS feeds and posted their papers elsewhere. But they effectively coordinated academic political scientists in the public square. That was good.

    In both cases, public coordination was self-reinforcing. I submitted work to TMC because I knew others would; I looked at Twitter and generated free content on the platform because lots of other people were. But self-reinforcing equilibria are not robust to all possible perturbations. You present the system with a big enough shock, and people won’t coordinate anymore. If you’re not generating that content anymore, I won’t look anymore, so you won’t look anymore, so I won’t generate content anymore.

    Put simply, academic Twitter isn’t broken for you because I stopped using it. It’s broken for me because many of you stopped using it.

    Who Wants To Be the Focal Point?

    There is a story associated with Thomas Schelling, author of The Strategy of Conflict, an important text on applied game theory which introduces the concept of the coordination game. The story goes, if you ask a whole bunch of people where to meet in New York without allowing them to communicate with one another, they will probably meet at Grand Central Terminal. This is the place where each person believes others are most likely to go (at least, so the story goes): if I don’t know how much you know about New York City, and I can’t communicate with you, my best guess of a place that you do know is Grand Central. I might be wrong, and others might choose other spots for similar reasons, but it’s the best guess we have knowing nothing else about one another.

    Used to be, Twitter and TMC were like that. If you told me to look exactly one place to find new research on some political science topic, I would look to Twitter. If you told me to look exactly one place for people writing for a public audience, it would be TMC. Where do academic political scientists coordinate now?

    Short answer, I don’t know. Slightly longer answer, I can think of three general possibilities.

    The first is to coordinate on some other social medium. Seems like a lot of people I know are starting up on Threads, and some institutions I’m affiliated with are now experimenting with Threads too. But I also noticed much the same thing about 9 months ago about Mastodon. So maybe the focal point will switch from Musk to Zuck, but I’m pretty skeptical.

    The second and third involve blogs, so they’re quite similar in that sense, but with some key differences.

    In one model, a TMC-like team starts a blog like the old TMC, but with a more explicit centralizing function. A good example of this is Daily Nous, a philosophy blog. I read that blog regularly through my trusty RSS feed, and while I am quite sure that it doesn’t cover everything in academic philosophy, it does cover quite a bit of terrain.

    In the last model, an individual political scientist starts a high-volume blog that talks openly about what’s going on in the discipline. It will be best if this person can post at least once a day, and if that person has a very distinct editorial perspective. In that sense, it’s entirely different than Daily Nous—rather than intending to be neutral, an individual blog in the service of the profession is probably most useful if it annoys a significant number of people a good portion of the time. Philosophy has Brian Leiter. Statistics has Andrew Gelman.

    This individual-blog model has more in common with Twitter than you might think. People don’t just read blogs like Leiter Reports, they also hate-read them. Kinda like Twitter. But these are blogs that are so important that even people who dislike what they have to say can’t really ignore them. The job rumors sites could even fulfill this function if they weren’t so full of disgusting content and absolute bullshit.

    I don’t know who wants to be the Leiter or the Gelman for political science. (I have neither the interest nor the constitution for it.) But you can imagine how such a political science blog might work. I also don’t know who wants to do a Daily Nous-type blog, but I do suspect that it is a huge amount of largely thankless work.

    What about other community blogs in the discipline? Duck of Minerva is the closest that I know of such an enterprise, but it has evolved quite a bit since the exciting early 2010s. (I know nothing about what has happened there and I have no ability to comment on it. But I’m glad it exists.) There are also lots of great community blogs—i.e. Crooked Timber (HBD!), and in my world, New Mandala—that have been and still are essential for particular interest communities for years. As I wrote a bit ago, the blogosphere is exciting again right now, with Substacks galore that keep my RSS feed nice and busy.

    But none of these blogs coordinates public-facing academic political science. Maybe that’s impossible now, and maybe that’s not as important for the discipline as it used to be, or as I think it was. Still, I do find it useful to think about what it would take to coordinate again.

    NOTES

    * Why not just stay logged into Twitter on all my devices forever? Because fuck off, Elon. I decide. Build Edgelord Weibo with someone else’s handle.
    ** You may remember that moment in fall 2022 when a bunch of people publicly said they won’t use Twitter anymore because they didn’t like Musk’s content moderation choices, and then came right back like a week later? I remember that too. Maybe that’s most political science Tweeters—but it’s not all of them, and more importantly, it ended the common (but always false) belief that using Twitter was some neutral apolitical choice.
    *** What’s the “for worse” part? I mean, did you ever try to have a serious academic discussion on Twitter? I’m deep at work at a serious and potentially sensitive research project, and I have never once—not for a single nanosecond—thought about sharing it on Twitter. Why subject myself to the mob, to point-scoring misreads, snarky quote-tweets, so that a bunch of randoms can get their dopamine hits? Especially when it’s research that I really and truly care about? I know I’ve been part of this very problem before, so mea culpa. But I did used to really enjoy reading the DMs that I got about the latest papers in my discipline and others.