Cheryl Julia Lee is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University and Co-coordinator of the Singapore Studies Research Cluster at NTU. She has a forthcoming essay on Filipina Australian author Merlinda Bobis’s speculative novel Fish-Hair Woman in Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has also co-authored a journal article on “Digital Communities at Work: Singapore Poetry Writing Month” published in TEXT. Dr. Lee has also co-edited two anthologies of Singaporean poetry and authored a poetry collection We Were Always Eating Expired Things.
Abstract: “Who and What Deserves to Live in a Smart Nation?—The Critique of Meritocracy in 21st Century Singaporean Speculative Fiction”
This presentation examines the critique of meritocracy put forth in 21st century Singaporean speculative fiction narratives that imagine societies organized by systems that quantify an individuals’ worth.
Singapore’s rapid development into a First World economy has often been internally attributed to its meritocratic system. Perceived as a means of achieving economic competitiveness while governing equitably, meritocracy has been propagated since the state’s early years of independence as a bulwark against the narrative of its uncertain survival—as a small island with no natural resources, negotiating a colonial legacy of a multicultural population comprising largely of migrants with no common loyalties and values. This system has only become more entrenched since the city state’s pivot to a knowledge-based economy in the 1980s, with greater emphasis placed on the individual and their intellectual capabilities.
21st century Singaporean speculative fiction returns us to meritocracy’s satirical foundations as expressed in Michael Young’s The Rise of The Meritocracy, where the term was first coined. Narratives such as Victor Ocampo’s “I m d 1 in 10” (2017), Clara Chow’s “Welcome, 265 Aggregate Scorers!” (2018), Farihan Bahron’s “Gold, Paper and Bare Bones” (2021), and ila’s “Mother Techno” (2021) project extreme scientifically managed futures filled with various indexes of human experiences and social credit systems. In doing so, they explore the wide-ranging effects of a political philosophy that assigns power and influence largely on the basis of “merit”, often narrowly defined: the objectification of humans, which paves the way for unethical behavior; greater social stratification and inequality; and a privileging of certain capacities (e.g., instrumental reasoning, commensuration) over others (e.g., creativity) to the detriment of society.