P Holden
Biographic Data
| ID | 15010 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Holden |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Holden |
| SIGNATURE | HOLDEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4720-1267 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1938 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Roundtable on alternative modernities and alternative methodologies in Southeast Asia
Rajaratnam in London: Writing, race, and capital in Singapore's intellectual history
Dominant historiography in Singapore celebrates Sinnathamby Rajaratnam as one of the city-state's founding national fathers, and the intellectual superintendent of state-sponsored multiculturalism in what has been characterized as an 'illiberal democracy'. Little attention, however, has been paid to the extensive periods of Rajaratnam's life in which he was not in governance with the People's Action Party, and thus had considerable intellectual a…
The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature
This book forges new ground in the relationship between cities and World Literature. Through a series of essays spanning a variety of metropolises, it shows how cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions, acts of linguistic and cultural translation, topographic conceptualizations, global imaginaries, and narratives of self-fashioning that are central to understanding World Literature and its debates. Alongside an introduction and three …
Novelization as Postcolonial Self-Fashioning: Lee Kok Liang’s London Does Not Belong to Me
This article exemplifies a mode of analysis in which the novel is read as a practice of self-making under decolonization. The argument is illustrated through attention to Lee Kok Liang’s novel London Does Not Belong to Me . Written describing Lee’s experiences as a Malayan law student in London in the 1950s, the novel was published posthumously in Malaysia fifty years later. Comparison of the published text with Lee’s journal of his student days …
Do the Write Thing”: Writing Schizophrenia in Singapore
This essay examines two recent memoirs of schizophrenia in Singapore: Chan Lishan’s A Philosopher’s Madness and Danielle Lim’s The Sound of Sch. The narratives, through the memoir form, question voice, agency, and self-making in a society in which colonial governing rationalities have now transformed into national and neoliberal ones
Colonialism with benefits? Singaporean peoplehood and colonial contradiction
Most of the research presented in this special issue questions the notion of a singular Singaporean story, and yet this narrative persists as a form of Gramscian common sense for most Singaporeans, whether young or old, and also for recent immigrants and international commentators. To understand the reasons for this persistence, I turn to American political scientist Rogers M. Smith's concept of narratives of peoplehood, and in particular his not…
Spaces of Autonomy, Spaces of Hope: The place of the university in post-colonial Singapore
This article explores the background to and consequences of the resignation of B. R. Sreenivasan as the vice-chancellor of the University of Singapore in October 1963, after a public clash with the People's Action Party state government, led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Sreenivasan's resignation has been the subject of radically different historical interpretations. It has been celebrated by some nationalist historians as part of a process of …
A Building with One Side Missing: Liberal Arts and Illiberal Modernities in Singapore
The Transnational, Global, and Planetary
10.1080/08989575.2017.1287880
Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions by Gillian Whitlock
Reviewed by: Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions by Gillian Whitlock Philip Holden (bio) Gillian Whitlock. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford UP, 2015, 284 pp. ISBN 978-0199560622, $31.95. Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions in the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series brings together two approaches to literary studies that have met different fates ov…
‘Somewhere Foreign Enough To Belong To’: Patrick Anderson, Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents
Patrick Anderson taught poetry at the University of Malaya in Singapore from 1950 to 1952. A migrant from the United Kingdom to Canada in the 1940s, he had become a Marxist, worked as editor of the influential Montreal literary magazine Preview, and developed a distinctive poetic style that might be called queer modernism. Anderson arrived in Singapore at a time when a new generation of student writers he taught was developing a distinctly Malaya…
“Is it manipulative? Sure. But that’s how you tell stories”: The graphic novel, metahistory and the artist in The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye has become a cause célèbre in contemporary Singapore. Much popular discussion of the novel has, however, been reductive, often describing it as simply presenting alternative histories in contrast to a hegemonic historical narrative celebrating Singapore’s rise as a developmental state. Close reading of the novel’s use of both graphic and textual elements reveals that The Art of Charlie …
Tears and Garlands: Lim Chin Siong, Coldstore, and the End(s) of Narrative
This paper considers the role of biography in contemporary remembrance of the moment of decolonisation in Singapore. To challenge a hegemonic developmental narrative told through the biography of Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, many popular and academic historians have focused on the lives of political figures previously written out of history. Most notable among these is the opposition leader Lim Chin Siong, who was detained in 1…
Selves in Dialogue: W. Somerset Maugham and Dementia's Stories
Biographical accounts of the British writer W. Somerset Maugham have often focused on his sexuality. These accounts may be complemented by a disability studies perspective, in which Maugham's stammer is not seen as simply an impediment to be overcome, but an enabling force in the narrative framing and timing that his writing displays. Maugham's mild cognitive impairment and then dementia in the last few years of his life have proved a formidable …
Literary Biography as a Critical Form
The recent proliferation of formally innovative literary biographies suggests that the genre has an important critical function. Literary biographies are more than simply an ancillary genre; rather, they ask questions regarding the manner in which readers relate to the implied authors of the literary texts they encounter, and their use of this relationship in their own projects of individualization in modern society
Between Modernization and Modernism: Community and Contradiction in the Paracolonial Short Story
The significance of short stories in the imagining of national communities has often been understated, with short stories seen merely as apprentice work for the novel. A reading of short stories by Filipino Manuel Arguilla and Singaporean S. Rajaratnam written during the transition from colonialism to national independence illustrates that the short story is not only a more common form but also, because of its formal qualities, perhaps better equ…
A Life as a Work of Art: W. Somerset Maugham’s Intimate Publics
Since his death in 1965, the British writer W. Somerset Maugham has been the subject of numerous memoirs as well as four substantial biographies. Maugham’s long life intersected with many of the central concerns of global modernity in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century: changing gender roles, the disintegration of colonial empires, a new identity politics of sexuality and changing media technologies. Maugham was notably reticent…
Reading for Genre: The Short Story and (Post)colonial Governmentality
Postcolonial literary studies has paid a great deal of attention to the novel and much less to the short story, despite the fact that the latter is often a more common means of literary expression in late colonial and early post-independence periods. The majority of scholarship on postcolonial short stories, furthermore, explores stories as printed in retrospectively constructed collections, rather than considering the original context of publica…
Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation
Interrogating Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in the City-State: Some Recent Singapore Fiction in English
‘Singapore stories’ are often metonymic of larger cultural and political processes. Tales of arrival published in Singapore become allegories of a developmental narrative of nationalism; tales of departure published outside Singapore by out‐migrants often negotiate with the multicultural politics of the country in which their authors have settled. Recent Singapore fiction in English that occupies an interstitial space between in‐ and out‐migratio…
Unbecoming Rizal: José Garcia Villa's Biographical Translations
José Garcia Villa is best known as a modernist Filipino poet who migrated to America in the 1930s. Much critical discussion of Villa in Philippine literary studies has emphasised his narrow concern with aestheticism and his rejection of contemporary demands to politicise artistic production. This paper returns to Villa's first short story collection Footnote of Youth (1933) and argues for a reconsideration of the politics of Villa's modernist aes…
The ‘postcolonial Gothic: Absent Histories, Present Contexts1
Postcolonial desire: Placing Singapore
This paper examines the possible utility of postcolonialism as a mode of intellectual or social critique in Singapore, arguing that while the concerns of postcolonial studies are relevant to a contemporary Singapore context, they also need to be interrogated, adapted, and indeed transformed. In order to do this, the paper provincializes postcolonial theory and criticism by examining the conditions of postcolonialism's emergence as a discipline th…
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (review)
Reviewed by: Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal Philip Holden (bio) Javed Majeed . Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 309 pp. ISBN 1-4039-8595-2, $85.00. Javed Majeed's new book is an important intervention in contemporary auto/ biography studies. It is centrally concerned with the autobiographical writings of three figures, all publ…
Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
The ‘postcolonial Gothic: Absent Histories, Present Contexts1
Spaces of Autonomy, Spaces of Hope: The place of the university in post-colonial Singapore
This article explores the background to and consequences of the resignation of B. R. Sreenivasan as the vice-chancellor of the University of Singapore in October 1963, after a public clash with the People's Action Party state government, led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Sreenivasan's resignation has been the subject of radically different historical interpretations. It has been celebrated by some nationalist historians as part of a process of …
Do the Write Thing”: Writing Schizophrenia in Singapore
This essay examines two recent memoirs of schizophrenia in Singapore: Chan Lishan’s A Philosopher’s Madness and Danielle Lim’s The Sound of Sch. The narratives, through the memoir form, question voice, agency, and self-making in a society in which colonial governing rationalities have now transformed into national and neoliberal ones
Colonialism with benefits? Singaporean peoplehood and colonial contradiction
Most of the research presented in this special issue questions the notion of a singular Singaporean story, and yet this narrative persists as a form of Gramscian common sense for most Singaporeans, whether young or old, and also for recent immigrants and international commentators. To understand the reasons for this persistence, I turn to American political scientist Rogers M. Smith's concept of narratives of peoplehood, and in particular his not…
Postcolonial desire: Placing Singapore
This paper examines the possible utility of postcolonialism as a mode of intellectual or social critique in Singapore, arguing that while the concerns of postcolonial studies are relevant to a contemporary Singapore context, they also need to be interrogated, adapted, and indeed transformed. In order to do this, the paper provincializes postcolonial theory and criticism by examining the conditions of postcolonialism's emergence as a discipline th…
Rajaratnam’s Tiger: Race, Gender and the Beginnings of Singapore Nationalism
Singapore’s future Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, wrote a significant and neglected body of short stories while studying Law in London in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Under the influence of his London contemporaries such as Mulk Raj Anand, Rajaratnam’s stories do imaginative work that prepares the ground for decolonization. In engaging with Malayan nationalism, they inevitably encounter the problematics of imagining a na…
Are calcium isotopes a reliable monitor of trophic level in marine settings
Recent research has shown that calcium isotopes are fractionated by metabolic processes, leading to a decrease in 44Ca/40Ca ratio with increasing trophic level. If so, calcium isotopes could provide information on trophic relationships within foodwebs millions of years older than what we have been able to study thus far with alternative methods (i.e., nitrogen isotopes (δ15N), Sr/Ca). To explore whether δ44Ca values provided marine trophic level …
Modernity's body: Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana
‘Without discipline true freedom cannot survive.’ Kwame Nkrumah In March 1935, a young schoolteacher from the British colony of the Gold Coast applied for admission to Lincoln University, Pennsylva
Castle, Coffin, Stomach: Dracula and the Banality of the Occult
Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins? — Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) Art is completion; not merely a history of endeavour. — Stoker, Personal Reminiscences (1906) “H E CAN, WHEN ONCE HE FIND HIS WAY ,” says Van Helsing of Dracula, “come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound” (211; ch. 18). Recent criticism has claimed similar powers for Stoker’s text, and it…
A Man and an Island: Gender and Nation in Lee Kuan Yew's the Singapore Story
Memoirs are always, to a certain degree, an act of revenge on history. --Georges Gusdorf The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either. --Oscar Wilde Introduction In the last month of 1941, Japanese troops landed in Thailand and Northeast Malaya, and began fighting their way down the Peninsula to Singapore. British capital ships Repulse and Prince of Wales, sent to intercept the invading force, wer…
On the Nation’s Margins: The Social Place of Literature in Singapore
Despite the fact that there is now a substantial body of Singaporean literature in English, little connection is made between literary texts and the national imaginary, and literary study in schools is taught using a syllabus with a preponderance of British texts. The roots of this paradox may be explored by examining the institution of English studies under the colonial state in the Straits Settlements, followed by developments immediately after…
Novelization as Postcolonial Self-Fashioning: Lee Kok Liang’s London Does Not Belong to Me
This article exemplifies a mode of analysis in which the novel is read as a practice of self-making under decolonization. The argument is illustrated through attention to Lee Kok Liang’s novel London Does Not Belong to Me . Written describing Lee’s experiences as a Malayan law student in London in the 1950s, the novel was published posthumously in Malaysia fifty years later. Comparison of the published text with Lee’s journal of his student days …
A Building with One Side Missing: Liberal Arts and Illiberal Modernities in Singapore
The Transnational, Global, and Planetary
10.1080/08989575.2017.1287880
A Life as a Work of Art: W. Somerset Maugham’s Intimate Publics
Since his death in 1965, the British writer W. Somerset Maugham has been the subject of numerous memoirs as well as four substantial biographies. Maugham’s long life intersected with many of the central concerns of global modernity in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century: changing gender roles, the disintegration of colonial empires, a new identity politics of sexuality and changing media technologies. Maugham was notably reticent…
Interrogating Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in the City-State: Some Recent Singapore Fiction in English
‘Singapore stories’ are often metonymic of larger cultural and political processes. Tales of arrival published in Singapore become allegories of a developmental narrative of nationalism; tales of departure published outside Singapore by out‐migrants often negotiate with the multicultural politics of the country in which their authors have settled. Recent Singapore fiction in English that occupies an interstitial space between in‐ and out‐migratio…
Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Colonial Fiction, Hybrid Lives: Early Singaporean Fiction in The Straits Chinese Magazine
After-School Careers of Negro High School Graduates of Houston, Texas, 1933
For more than thirty years Negro graduates have been receiving high school diplomas in Houston, Texas. These graduates are taking some part, great or small, in the activities of the communities in which they are living. Consequently, after commencement, whither and what of the high school graduates? This question among others suggested the present investigation. The Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association in its report…
Children of the Cities
Dissonant Voices: Straits Chinese Appropriation of Colonial Travel Writing
(1998). DISSONANT VOICES: STRAITS CHINESE APPROPRIATION OF COLONIAL TRAVEL WRITING. Studies in Travel Writing: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 181-189
Colonial Fiction, Hybrid Lives: Early Singaporean Fiction in The Straits Chinese Magazine
On the Nation’s Margins: The Social Place of Literature in Singapore
Despite the fact that there is now a substantial body of Singaporean literature in English, little connection is made between literary texts and the national imaginary, and literary study in schools is taught using a syllabus with a preponderance of British texts. The roots of this paradox may be explored by examining the institution of English studies under the colonial state in the Straits Settlements, followed by developments immediately after…
Reinscribing Orientalism: Gendering Modernity in Colonial Malaya
Castle, Coffin, Stomach: Dracula and the Banality of the Occult
Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins? — Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) Art is completion; not merely a history of endeavour. — Stoker, Personal Reminiscences (1906) “H E CAN, WHEN ONCE HE FIND HIS WAY ,” says Van Helsing of Dracula, “come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound” (211; ch. 18). Recent criticism has claimed similar powers for Stoker’s text, and it…
A Man and an Island: Gender and Nation in Lee Kuan Yew's the Singapore Story
Memoirs are always, to a certain degree, an act of revenge on history. --Georges Gusdorf The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either. --Oscar Wilde Introduction In the last month of 1941, Japanese troops landed in Thailand and Northeast Malaya, and began fighting their way down the Peninsula to Singapore. British capital ships Repulse and Prince of Wales, sent to intercept the invading force, wer…
Are calcium isotopes a reliable monitor of trophic level in marine settings
Recent research has shown that calcium isotopes are fractionated by metabolic processes, leading to a decrease in 44Ca/40Ca ratio with increasing trophic level. If so, calcium isotopes could provide information on trophic relationships within foodwebs millions of years older than what we have been able to study thus far with alternative methods (i.e., nitrogen isotopes (δ15N), Sr/Ca). To explore whether δ44Ca values provided marine trophic level …
Modernity's body: Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana
‘Without discipline true freedom cannot survive.’ Kwame Nkrumah In March 1935, a young schoolteacher from the British colony of the Gold Coast applied for admission to Lincoln University, Pennsylva
Other Modernities: National Autobiography and Globalization
A series of "national autobiographies," written by political leaders testifying to the struggle of anticolonial nationalism to form an independent nation, achieved popularity with a global reading public in the twentieth century. These texts are both amenable to reading through the critical frameworks of contemporary auto/biography studies, and also offer useful challenges to contemporary critical common sense about the relationships between glob…
Missing in Action: The Strange Case of Imperial Autobiography
Rajaratnam’s Tiger: Race, Gender and the Beginnings of Singapore Nationalism
Singapore’s future Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, wrote a significant and neglected body of short stories while studying Law in London in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Under the influence of his London contemporaries such as Mulk Raj Anand, Rajaratnam’s stories do imaginative work that prepares the ground for decolonization. In engaging with Malayan nationalism, they inevitably encounter the problematics of imagining a na…
Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (review)
Reviewed by: Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal Philip Holden (bio) Javed Majeed . Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 309 pp. ISBN 1-4039-8595-2, $85.00. Javed Majeed's new book is an important intervention in contemporary auto/ biography studies. It is centrally concerned with the autobiographical writings of three figures, all publ…
Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Postcolonial desire: Placing Singapore
This paper examines the possible utility of postcolonialism as a mode of intellectual or social critique in Singapore, arguing that while the concerns of postcolonial studies are relevant to a contemporary Singapore context, they also need to be interrogated, adapted, and indeed transformed. In order to do this, the paper provincializes postcolonial theory and criticism by examining the conditions of postcolonialism's emergence as a discipline th…
Unbecoming Rizal: José Garcia Villa's Biographical Translations
José Garcia Villa is best known as a modernist Filipino poet who migrated to America in the 1930s. Much critical discussion of Villa in Philippine literary studies has emphasised his narrow concern with aestheticism and his rejection of contemporary demands to politicise artistic production. This paper returns to Villa's first short story collection Footnote of Youth (1933) and argues for a reconsideration of the politics of Villa's modernist aes…
The ‘postcolonial Gothic: Absent Histories, Present Contexts1
Reading for Genre: The Short Story and (Post)colonial Governmentality
Postcolonial literary studies has paid a great deal of attention to the novel and much less to the short story, despite the fact that the latter is often a more common means of literary expression in late colonial and early post-independence periods. The majority of scholarship on postcolonial short stories, furthermore, explores stories as printed in retrospectively constructed collections, rather than considering the original context of publica…
Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation
Interrogating Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in the City-State: Some Recent Singapore Fiction in English
‘Singapore stories’ are often metonymic of larger cultural and political processes. Tales of arrival published in Singapore become allegories of a developmental narrative of nationalism; tales of departure published outside Singapore by out‐migrants often negotiate with the multicultural politics of the country in which their authors have settled. Recent Singapore fiction in English that occupies an interstitial space between in‐ and out‐migratio…
A Life as a Work of Art: W. Somerset Maugham’s Intimate Publics
Since his death in 1965, the British writer W. Somerset Maugham has been the subject of numerous memoirs as well as four substantial biographies. Maugham’s long life intersected with many of the central concerns of global modernity in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century: changing gender roles, the disintegration of colonial empires, a new identity politics of sexuality and changing media technologies. Maugham was notably reticent…
Between Modernization and Modernism: Community and Contradiction in the Paracolonial Short Story
The significance of short stories in the imagining of national communities has often been understated, with short stories seen merely as apprentice work for the novel. A reading of short stories by Filipino Manuel Arguilla and Singaporean S. Rajaratnam written during the transition from colonialism to national independence illustrates that the short story is not only a more common form but also, because of its formal qualities, perhaps better equ…
Literary Biography as a Critical Form
The recent proliferation of formally innovative literary biographies suggests that the genre has an important critical function. Literary biographies are more than simply an ancillary genre; rather, they ask questions regarding the manner in which readers relate to the implied authors of the literary texts they encounter, and their use of this relationship in their own projects of individualization in modern society
Selves in Dialogue: W. Somerset Maugham and Dementia's Stories
Biographical accounts of the British writer W. Somerset Maugham have often focused on his sexuality. These accounts may be complemented by a disability studies perspective, in which Maugham's stammer is not seen as simply an impediment to be overcome, but an enabling force in the narrative framing and timing that his writing displays. Maugham's mild cognitive impairment and then dementia in the last few years of his life have proved a formidable …
History (25 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Art (23 works) · Socioeconomic Development in Asia (21 works) · Literature (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Asian Studies and History (15 works) · History (15 works)