Written by Ashley Chin and Alston Ng, edited by Danan Lee. With contributions from Ashley Tan, James Ham, and Kriti Andhare. Cover photo by Joshua Vargas. On the morning of August 27th, students and faculty at the University Scholars Programme (USP) and Yale-NUS College tuned in to a Zoom town hall meeting which was abruptly…
My modest proposal is that we jettison “identity”, and move towards articulating and practicing a politics of multiplicity, indeterminacy, and singular-plural being. I focus here on the issue of gender, specifically on the (mis)use of gender pronouns, and offer a new ontological footing for a politics of “strategic obfuscation” which aims to disrupt hegemonic gender and sexual taxonomies. Simply, this essay calls for a collective adoption of “them” pronouns in a post-genderist, post-identitarian spirit of deprivileging sameness and interpersonal difference….
Explaining a joke to someone sucks. Not only is it a struggle, but it also ruins the joke for everyone else. Yet, is there anything more human than knowing something is pointless and still doing it anyway? In that spirit, let us explore some prominent theories explaining jokes and humour, asking questions like why and when we laugh….
Why are Generation Z obsessed with and relate to a royal from another life? In The Diacritic’s first multimedia piece, Vivien Sim examines the social media mania over Princess Diana….
The Diacritic has been on hiatus since the news on Friday 27 August of the merger of Yale-NUS College and the University Scholars Program into New College. No merger is painless, and in this case this merger has meant the closure of Yale-NUS College as an institution. This merger takes place amidst a series other mergers that impact up to half of the National University of Singapore. What is common about the nature of these mergers is that the affected parties—students, faculty, staff—were only informed after the decisions were made, and were given no say in any of the decisions affecting their lives….
Prof. Tan Sor-Hoon is a Professor of Philosophy at Singapore Management University, the Academic Director of Politics, Law and Economics (PLE) major, and a Lee Kong Chian Fellow. She writes primarily on Confucianism and democratic theory. In this finale of a two-part series, The Diacritic’s Wang Xing Hao speaks to Prof. Tan on her life’s work reconciling Confucianism with democracy….
The fire had a vehemence to it; roaring with unmitigated fervour, echoing the chants of the Parsis in attendance. Although only present through teleconferencing, I couldn’t help but be enthralled by the prayer house as the prayers and chants commenced at the Parsi Zoroastrian Association of Singapore. The room was ornately decorated: the floor was covered with what seemed to resemble Iranian antique Persian rugs, and the walls were inundated with portraits of their transcendent creator deity, Ahura Mazda. Notably, the ornamentations that were used to furnish the prayer room shared a striking similitude—they all depicted the natural world….
On 29 October 1967, Singaporean men abruptly began clutching their groins, seized by a sudden panic that their genitals were irrevocably retracting into their bodies. This trickle of cases soon turned into a torrent, with daily cases at the Singapore General Hospital peaking at 97 on 3 November. The total caseload amounted to 469, with the vast majority of the afflicted (97%) being male. While the general populace initially believed the source of contagion to be pork contaminated by a swine flu vaccine, authorities issued repeated reassurances that this was not the case, instead proposing psychological factors for the outbreak. The public debunking of the vaccine theory was apparently enough to curb the epidemic, with case numbers dropping by half just a day after the Singapore Medical Association’s public announcement….
Which event has most changed your life? It is usually hard to give a clear, definitive answer. However, in China, there is a standard reply: it is the Gaokao, the nation-wide university entrance exam. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of the Gaokao in the national consciousness—every year in June, celebrities record videos to encourage examinees, crowds throng temples to pray to divinities associated with wisdom and intelligence, and motivational slogans are hung on the main gate of every high school, at least in my home city of Hangzhou. The most famous slogan of the pack is probably “one exam determines the rest of your life” (一考定终生). The common sentiment behind this phrase goes: a good score in Gaokao will gain you entry into a good university; a good university will lead you into a good company; a good company will bring you a good salary and social prestige; and these will finally enable you to form a happy family. Though such formulations may be somewhat overdramatic, it is still true for most Chinese that the Gaokao determines access to higher education and social mobility….
Within the span of a college career, Yale-NUS History Major Faris Joraimi (’21) has made a name for himself amongst Singaporean academic circles as an expert on Malay intellectual history. Now an editor for Raffles Renounced—a collection of essays decolonising Singaporean history—Faris chats with The Diacritic about how young students can be scholars in their own right. …