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Personal and Political Crises

Day 1, 17 February | 3.45PM - 5.15PM
Moderator: Andrew Kirkrose Devadason

1        Doomscroller's Complex

          Andrew Kirkrose Devadason

2        Affective Crisis in The Answers and Who Killed My Father

          Xiaoxiao Huang

3        On the Way

          Ni Zengxin

Doomscroller's Complex
Andrew Kirkrose Devadason

Reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, this poem extends Jericho Brown's duplex form to meditate on what it means to be simultaneously caught in motion and stuck in place. This piece was created for Spoke & Bird: To Malaysia with Linebreaks (co-presented with the Substation), and published in A/PART: An Anthology of Queer Southeast Asian Poetry in the Pandemic (Ed. Rodrigo dela Peña, Jr.).

Andrew Kirkrose Devadason is a queer transgender Singaporean and MA candidate in linguistics at NTU. Under his birth name, Devadason contributed the winning piece of the 2019 Hawker Prize to the journal OF ZOOS. His work has appeared in journals including Cordite Poetry Review and PERVERSE, and anthologies including EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices.

Affective Crisis in The Answers and Who Killed my Father
Xiaoxiao Huang

Contemporary fiction has so far been primarily regarded as an attempt towards a reinvigorated sense of realism. Whereas Hans Demeyer and Sven Vitse (2021) have recently suggested an alternative hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift towards an affective dominant. Drawing mainly from the work of Brian McHale, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Hans Demeyer, this article substantiates this hypothesis through offering readings of representative The Answers (2017) by Catherine Lacey and Who Killed my Father (2019) by Édouard Louis. By studying the entanglement between the two novels’ affective issues and sociopolitical environments, I argue that both protagonists experience a severe affective crisis in the domain of intimacy and gender, and it is not resolved in The Answers but might be solved in Who Killed my Father.

Xiaoxiao Huang is a PhD student from the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She earned her M.A. in Comparative Literature (Distinction) from University College London (UCL), the United Kingdom; her B.A. in English (First Class Honors) from Hunan Normal University, China. Her research interests are affect theories, gender studies and Victorian literature.

On the Way
Ni Zengxin

The short story describes a Chinese couple’s unexpected experiences after being laid off owing to the economic depression as the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic. Receiving an unexpected offer from a Singaporean company, the couple got everything done to set out the inspiring journey, but they didn’t anticipate what would happen to them…

Ni Zengxin is a first-year PhD candidate in English literature at the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University. She has taken the creative writing course, in which she learned a lot from other experienced writers by sharing and commenting pieces of stories in the workshop.

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