Written by: Rebekah Nix, Edited by: Ashley Tan & Darren Teo Picture 1: Photo of Kampong Lorong Buangkok.[efn_note] Soo, JX. Kampung Lorong Buangkok. Photograph. 2022. [/efn_note] 1. Personal Narrative When you think of Singapore’s architecture, what immediately comes to mind? Towering skyscrapers? Streets of shopfronts built to showcase a fusion of Malay, Chinese, and European architectural…
Written by Nuha Hafiz & Daniela Ferreira Franco Moura, edited by Darren Teo & Ashley Tan After being called “dirty” by a classmate, a young girl tries to shave off the colour of her skin with a razor. At the funeral of her unkind grandmother, a woman reflects on the cycle of abuse and abandonment…
The game screen turns black, an intermittent pause before the credits start rolling. At the bottom of the screen, the male hero Mario is standing next to Princess Peach. Playing as Mario, you have successfully rescued the princess! Your journey complete, and you venture forth into the next world.
The question repeats….
Once upon a time, fairy tales were read to you at bedtime. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, maybe. As you’ve grown older, you might even have encountered books from this rising genre, that of fairy tale retellings, largely catered to young adults and adults. Prevalent over the past decade, more books—and even movies—are marketed annually as retellings of fairy tales….
Dear Reader, The Diacritic has a few exciting announcements to share! This year we’ll be expanding The Diacritic. We welcome a team of new editors to our editorial board — Ashley Tan (‘26), Darren Teo (‘25), and Kriti Andhare (‘25). We are moving to a monthly publication schedule! So keep a lookout for interesting, insightful,…
Peer pressure and narratives of success have made the world increasingly intolerant to sidetracks and mistakes. We are always told to have a goal, a plan, or at least a schedule, in order to be successful. Yet when I looked up my professors’ resumes, I found gaps between colleges and graduate schools. I wondered what they did in those years, and if they ever regretted digressing from the “right” path… Or were these sidetracks important parts of what shaped their main path?…
Brought to you by Ashley Chin, Cindy Huang, Danan Lee, Rebekah Nix, and Qian Zilan. Over the course of one year, from Jan 2021 – Jan 2022, The Diacritic has published over 18 articles, including: an interview with a Nobel Prize Laureate, an analysis of Tik Tok, and most recently—a digital museum in collaboration with…
It is a cliché that we live in an interconnected world. What is less obvious is that, historically, interconnection is not the exception but rather the rule. In our modern urge to demarcate and celebrate ethnic identities and national characters, we often lose sight that humans have been interacting, creating, and trading across dividing lines since time immemorial. From a Greek-influenced Buddha head of the 4th century to a truly global patchwork of the 18th, we here at The Diacritic have partnered with Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum to showcase three artefacts that best exemplify this fact….
The Diacritic, in collaboration with the Asian Civilisations Museum, is proud to present the Digital Museum, an attempt to imagine the future of heritage appreciation using modern web technologies and an appreciation of the past. We are proud to showcase artefacts that exhibit the interconnected histories of the civilisations of Asia, which are bound through the threads of cultural influence and centuries of trade….