Publications
“In these new Asian tropicalities, elements of neocolonial control and anticolonial rebellion, capitalist spectacle and spectrality, are not opposed in any simple binary ways. Instead, like the creeping plants, epiphytes, and bromeliads that twine themselves on the steel and concrete skeletons of the Supertrees, and the ongoing battle to keep the cooled conservatories sealed off from the tropical exterior — plant life, climate, and human endeavor are locked in a seemingly constant struggle for dominance.”
— Reading New Asian Tropicalities in Contemporary Singapore, Joanne Leow
Academic publications
Peer Reviewed Journal Publications
(2021) with Juria Toramae, ila, and Robert Zhao Renhui “Field Notes, Fluidities, and Fictional Archives: Transmedial Photography and Singapore’s Altered Coastlines.” Trans Asia Photography Review. Ed. Thy Phu.
(2021) “Reading the Nonhuman.” in “small, deferred: On Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Writing” Ed. Vinh Nguyen. Canadian Literature 241: 128-130.
(2020). “Reading New Asian Tropicalities in Contemporary Singapore" positions: asia critique 28.4
(2020). “this land was sea”: The Intimacies and Ruins of Transnational Sand. Verge: Studies in Global Asias. 6.2 Infrastructure issue. Eds. Jesslyn Abel and Leo Coleman.
(2020). Lost Islands, Future Islands: Reading Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour Relationally. University of Toronto Quarterly Vol. 89, No. 1, Special Issue: Literary Solidarities / Critical Accountability. 145-162.
(2020) Circumventing the Archive: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and To Singapore, with Love. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6.1: 58-67.
(2019) Lost Islands and Saltwater Cities. “The Minor Transpacific: A Roundtable.” BC Studies. No. 198. pp. 22-24.
(2017) Renovating Vancouver: Transnational Constructions and Mortgages in Sachiko Murakami’s Rebuild. Journal of Asian American Studies, 20(2). pp. 139-160.
(2015). “A delicate pellet of dust”: Dissident Flash Fictions from Contemporary Singapore. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51(6). pp. 723-736.
(2012). Beyond the Multiculture: Transnational Toronto in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For. Studies in Canadian Literature 37(2). pp. 192-212.
(2012). Mis-mappings and Mis-duplications: Interdiscursivity and the Poetry of Wayde Compton. Canadian Literature 214. pp. 47-66.
(2011). “‘Between home and home’: Crossings and Coastlines in the Poetry of Boey Kim Cheng.” Southeast Asian Review of English 50. pp. 35-46.
(2010). The Future of Nostalgia: Reclaiming Memory in Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City and Alfian Sa’at’s A History of Amnesia. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45 (1). pp. 115-130.
Book Chapters
Leow, J. (2023, forthcoming). “Confabulation as Decolonial Pedagogy: Singaporean Literature, SG50 and SG200.” Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum Eds. Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, Cambridge University Press.
Leow, J. (2022/23, forthcoming). “Reading and listening intently to David Chariandy’s Brother on the prairie campus” Call and Response-Ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation. Eds. Karina Vernon and Winfried Simerling, McGill-Queen’s UP.
Leow, J. (2021). “Theatre doesn’t change anything”: “Merdeka/ 獨立 /சுதந்திரம்” and the Performance of the Singapore Bicentennial. Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History. Eds. Lysa Hong, Sai Siew Min, Alfian Sa’at, and Faris Joraimi. Singapore: Ethos Books.
Leow, J. (2019) Transpacific Spaces and Asian Canadian Literature. In J. Lee (general editor), F. Cheung, J. Ho, A. Mannur, and C. Schlund-Vials (Eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature and Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP.
Leow, J. (2017) Strangers, Surrogates, Lovers: Foreign Domestic Workers in Contemporary Singapore Texts. In A. Poon and A. Whitehead (Eds.), Current Directions in Singapore Literature and Culture: Local and Global Contexts. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Pp. 198-216.
Book Reviews
(2019). Las Vegas in Singapore: Violence, Progress, and the Crisis of Nationalist Modernity. Singapore Unbound
(2017). Do Not Say We Have Nothing and Points of Origin. Wasafiri 91.
(2018). Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience by Rey Chow.Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. 5(1). pp. 134-35.
(2016). Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis by Julie Sze. English Language Notes 54(2), Fall/Winter 2016
(2016). Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China by Kelvin E.Y. Low." University of Toronto Quarterly, 85(3), 538–539.
(2013). Cherian George’s Freedom from the Press,. Southeast Asian Studies 2(3)
(2012). “The Chinese-ness of Chinese Food.” Singapore Review of Books, December 12.