Robbie B H Goh
Biographic Data
| ID | 322309 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robbie B H Goh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robbie B H |
| FAMILY NAME | Goh |
| SIGNATURE | GOH R B H |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 43 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Megachurch Discontents and Mainline Church Structures in Singapore
Megachurches have many recruiting advantages compared to smaller churches from mainline denominations which operate on more conventional church models. Megachurch leadership and liturgies are dedicated to the creation of an attractive and affective culture intended to draw and retain large numbers of congregants. Singapore, like some other locations in the Global South (such as the Philippines, South Korea and Indonesia), has seen rapid growth in…
Apocalypse
The Experience Megachurch
Megachurches, although differing in terms of denominational affiliation (or relative lack thereof), spatial logic, liturgy, teaching, and congregational demographics, share the common trait of size and are often fast-growing churches as well. This is particularly true of what might be called (following scholarship on the “experience economy”) the “experience megachurch”: those with a broad attractive appeal, large and growing congregations, and r…
Protestant evangelical pilgrimages
Christian pilgrimage sites can be separated into three broad categories: Biblical sites (e.g. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Patmos, and other locations where significant events happen in the Biblical narratives); older Catholic and Anglican sites whose importance has been established over a long history of many centuries (e.g. the Vatican, Lourdes, Canterbury); and lastly, newer sites associated with more recently established Protestant denominations and g…
The Jerusalem of Jesus
10.1080/14755610.2017.1339101
Christian Capital
Recent scholarship has pointed out the ways in which religions are increasingly commodified, primarily through two mechanisms: the monetisation of religious objects and practices, and the materialisation and extension of religious-symbolic power through new technologies and practices. These two mechanisms of monetisation and materialisation provide very concrete ways of understanding religious commodification, but they do not provide a complete p…
Memorializing genocide
Theorists have argued that the "attempt to comprehend" the genocidal event represented by Auschwitz has "defeated the intellects of countless men and women". Memorials at Auschwitz and other concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald, and to a certain extent those outside of Europe, such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia, are attempts to call attention to these atrocities in the hope of preventing the repetition of their like. Yet t…
The anatomy of Singlish
Singlish – ‘the name given to the colloquial variety of English spoken in Singapore’ [Wee, Lionel. 2014. “Linguistic Chutzpah and the Speak Good Singlish Movement.” World Englishes 33 (1): 85–99], incorporating Chinese dialect (particularly Hokkien) and Malay lexical and grammatical elements – has for some time been the antagonist in a cultural war of linguistic prescription (which has also targeted Chinese dialects) waged by the government. Some…
De-Orienting Religious Studies
Film-as-Maturion
Christianity has a long tradition of miracle healings, and in recent years this has been mobilized in interesting ways by digital technology and global communications. The result is somewhat paradoxical: on the one hand healings depend very much on the physical evidence of the body, first presented as damaged (sick, marred, impotent, in torment) and then after prayer and spiritual intervention, presented as manifestly whole and well. On the other…
The semiotics of undesirable bodies
Contemporary transnational migration has given rise to a new ideology and semiotics of the foreign body – one that draws on the cognitive field of the primitive, marked, and abjected body. This foreign body is carefully differentiated from both the sphere of the local/national, and the “expatriate” professional who by virtue of economic and cultural capital is desired and assimilated into the local sphere. An aspiring cosmopolitan and global city…
Noah's ark
The story of Noah and his Ark, recounted in the Christian Bible in Genesis 6–9 (but which also features in Judaism and Islam) offers a story of God's judgment for the sins of humankind, but also of his redemptive plan and hope for humankind and the rest of creation. This multifaceted story has made its mark on popular culture, in press accounts of archaeological digs in Mount Ararat, and in the visual arts, literature, film, television, and many …
The politics of English
Uncertain locale
The role and place of English in Singapore is shaped by a number of key cultural factors, including the nation’s colonial legacy, its multi-racial and multi-lingual society (and how this is handled by government policy), the push to position Singapore as a global city attracting transnational capital and flows of talent, and similar issues. These factors combine to create cultural tensions between language and race identifiers (for example, being…
Engaging future Asia
In an era of global capitalism's growing spread, and discourses of an ‘Asia-Pacific Century’ and the rise of China, India and the Asian ‘Tiger Economies’, and the increasing location of R&D and technological production plants in various countries in Asia, it is surprising but also revealing that imaginings of a technologically advanced Asia are few and far between. The perspective of speculative fiction — the domain wherein are expressed scientif…
The Lord of the Rings and New Zealand
Peter Jackson's decision to make the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films in his native New Zealand has given the country a major boost in tourism, but this has also become the paradigm of a new imaginative transformation of landscapes. The zeal with which many tourists visit these sites has similarities to the religious pilgrimage, not only in terms of the degree of enthusiasm invoked, but also in rituals of knowledge, ardour and “spiritual” envis…
The Overseas Indian and the political economy of the body in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
In the often highly-charged cultural politics of India, difference is played out in various ways, including in gendered, religious, and social terms. A newer and less obvious difference emerges as India struggles to attract foreign investment to the country, beginning with the cultural and economic campaign to engage Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) – or Overseas Indians, to use the term now growing in popularity – and to kindle their interest in the …
Narrating Race
The essays in this volume deal with the complexities of race in the Asia-Pacific context. Social tensions concerning race and ethnicity continue to pose profound challenges to Asia-Pacific countries in various stages of development and modernisation. Issues such as social justice, identity-formation, marginalisation and alienation, gender and related issues, are inevitably implicated in the racial cultures of Asia, and where Asian diasporic commu…
Competitive cities and human scales
Cities are inextricably bound to their human denizens, although this human dimension is complicated by the emphasis on scale, speed, and progress that often dominates the semiotics and discourses of urban competition. In a profoundly ambivalent movement, various aspects of human “livability” are highlighted in the “quality of life” components of cities rankings and planning, while at the same time the “megacity” trend in planning and semiosis con…
Narrating “Dark” India in Londonstani and The White Tiger
In Indian Anglophone writing up to about the 1990s, a romantic narrative strand, working in parallel with a metafictional “encyclopaedic” form in other texts of the period, reflects a more hopeful and positive attitude towards Indian society, and an implicit confidence in its potential redemption. Many later works by Indian diasporic writers show a much more negative and critical attitude to India, catalysed by persisting socio-political problems…
Christian identities in Singapore
Christianity in Singapore is caught between the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand it is compelled (like all other religions practised in Singapore) to conform to the state's controls (most obviously in the form of the ‘Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act’, but also implicitly or explicitly spelt out in various policies on religious space and practices, multiculturalism, and even matters of financial governance and accountability). On the other…
The Cultural Politics of Christianity in India
Myths of reversal
There have been a variety of cultural texts that have demonstrated their license to treat time and causal order differently from the common linear conception, and this has been particularly true in a late industrial, late capitalist and digital era. From modernist texts that attenuate the subjective narrative point of view far beyond common experiences of time and space, to playfully schizoid texts that celebrate their narrative power over everyd…
Hillsong and "megachurch" practice
Megachurches" are congregations with a weekly attendance of at least 2000, by one definition and that have been established recently-many of them since the 1980s-in a variety of countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. They are often distinguished and distinguish themselves, from older (including other large) churches by a number of characteristics: a contemporary worship s…
The Anxiety of Influences
In its rapid socio-economic transformation over the four decades or so of its existence as an independent nation and in its quest to position itself as a competitive global nation and service hub, Singapore has come to embody many of the cultural phenomena of Asian modernity in an age of globalization. This has imposed a number of cultural, narrative and ideological influences on its writers. Young “post-65” Anglophone Chinese novelists like Coli…
Hillsong and "megachurch" practice
Megachurches" are congregations with a weekly attendance of at least 2000, by one definition and that have been established recently-many of them since the 1980s-in a variety of countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. They are often distinguished and distinguish themselves, from older (including other large) churches by a number of characteristics: a contemporary worship s…
Christian identities in Singapore
Christianity in Singapore is caught between the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand it is compelled (like all other religions practised in Singapore) to conform to the state's controls (most obviously in the form of the ‘Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act’, but also implicitly or explicitly spelt out in various policies on religious space and practices, multiculturalism, and even matters of financial governance and accountability). On the other…
Ideologies of `Upgrading' in Singapore Public Housing
Studies of Singapore public housing have tended to emphasise the ways in which urban planning and housing policies have contributed to rapid infrastructural development in the 1970s and 1980s while maintaining racial harmony and providing affordable housing to the majority of the population. In the 1990s, a series of `upgrading' exercises in many Singapore Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates have signalled a change in the status and funct…
The anatomy of Singlish
Singlish – ‘the name given to the colloquial variety of English spoken in Singapore’ [Wee, Lionel. 2014. “Linguistic Chutzpah and the Speak Good Singlish Movement.” World Englishes 33 (1): 85–99], incorporating Chinese dialect (particularly Hokkien) and Malay lexical and grammatical elements – has for some time been the antagonist in a cultural war of linguistic prescription (which has also targeted Chinese dialects) waged by the government. Some…
The Lord of the Rings and New Zealand
Peter Jackson's decision to make the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films in his native New Zealand has given the country a major boost in tourism, but this has also become the paradigm of a new imaginative transformation of landscapes. The zeal with which many tourists visit these sites has similarities to the religious pilgrimage, not only in terms of the degree of enthusiasm invoked, but also in rituals of knowledge, ardour and “spiritual” envis…
Narrating “Dark” India in Londonstani and The White Tiger
In Indian Anglophone writing up to about the 1990s, a romantic narrative strand, working in parallel with a metafictional “encyclopaedic” form in other texts of the period, reflects a more hopeful and positive attitude towards Indian society, and an implicit confidence in its potential redemption. Many later works by Indian diasporic writers show a much more negative and critical attitude to India, catalysed by persisting socio-political problems…
Christian Capital
Recent scholarship has pointed out the ways in which religions are increasingly commodified, primarily through two mechanisms: the monetisation of religious objects and practices, and the materialisation and extension of religious-symbolic power through new technologies and practices. These two mechanisms of monetisation and materialisation provide very concrete ways of understanding religious commodification, but they do not provide a complete p…
The Internet and Christianity in Asia
The internet has not as yet transformed the majority of Asian nations into open, liberal and democratic societies. Although it has had a significant impact, particularly on business, advertising expenditures, gaming, ICQs and other such aspects of consumption and entertainment, and in some parts of Asia (particularly in well-networked nations like Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and others), its development and impact h…
The Overseas Indian and the political economy of the body in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
In the often highly-charged cultural politics of India, difference is played out in various ways, including in gendered, religious, and social terms. A newer and less obvious difference emerges as India struggles to attract foreign investment to the country, beginning with the cultural and economic campaign to engage Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) – or Overseas Indians, to use the term now growing in popularity – and to kindle their interest in the …
The Anxiety of Influences
In its rapid socio-economic transformation over the four decades or so of its existence as an independent nation and in its quest to position itself as a competitive global nation and service hub, Singapore has come to embody many of the cultural phenomena of Asian modernity in an age of globalization. This has imposed a number of cultural, narrative and ideological influences on its writers. Young “post-65” Anglophone Chinese novelists like Coli…
Imagining the Nation
Anglophone poetry has played a central role not only in the development of a national literature in Singapore in the first few decades after independence, but also in the articulation of a kind of national consciousness, a rhetorical rehearsal for an emergent nationhood. Examining the works of poets Edwin Thumboo, Goh Poh Seng, Arthur Yap and Lee Tzu Pheng - the first four Anglophone winners of the Cultural Medallion for literature, the Singapore…
Consuming Spaces
10.1080/103503300114531
Protestant evangelical pilgrimages
Christian pilgrimage sites can be separated into three broad categories: Biblical sites (e.g. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Patmos, and other locations where significant events happen in the Biblical narratives); older Catholic and Anglican sites whose importance has been established over a long history of many centuries (e.g. the Vatican, Lourdes, Canterbury); and lastly, newer sites associated with more recently established Protestant denominations and g…
The Jerusalem of Jesus
10.1080/14755610.2017.1339101
De-Orienting Religious Studies
Noah's ark
The story of Noah and his Ark, recounted in the Christian Bible in Genesis 6–9 (but which also features in Judaism and Islam) offers a story of God's judgment for the sins of humankind, but also of his redemptive plan and hope for humankind and the rest of creation. This multifaceted story has made its mark on popular culture, in press accounts of archaeological digs in Mount Ararat, and in the visual arts, literature, film, television, and many …
Myths of reversal
There have been a variety of cultural texts that have demonstrated their license to treat time and causal order differently from the common linear conception, and this has been particularly true in a late industrial, late capitalist and digital era. From modernist texts that attenuate the subjective narrative point of view far beyond common experiences of time and space, to playfully schizoid texts that celebrate their narrative power over everyd…
Textual Spaces, Social Identities and Race in Singapore Advertising
Advertising in Singapore contests certain notions that prevail in much of the current advertising theory - notions of the advertisement as `commodity sign', removed from the real particularities of social contexts, in order to interpellate consumer readers into a uniform set of `symbolic exchange values'. The influence of Marxist thought in such theory is clear. However, this method of analysis is not remunerative in the Singapore context, chiefl…
The Silent Word
overwritten unwritten - nationalism and its doubles in theory, R.J.C. Young the politics of the unwritten and the question of value, I. Small notes on atavism, D.W. Davis epic, colonialism, empire - a reading of Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, W. Lim after the (unwritten post-colonial in southeast Asia - what happens next? I.S. Talib relativity, uncertainty and imaginary time - the pseudoscientific basis of postmodernist literary th…
Textual Hyde and Seek
In discussing what is perhaps the nineteenth century's most famous and enduring story of split identities, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 short novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, critics have quite predictably used Dr. Jekyll's scientific project as an analogue for the narrative itself. Stevenson's tale, it is argued, offers a plethora of signs split off from their signifieds, voices disembodied and dislocated, and distinctions elide…
Peter O'Donnell, Race Relations and National Identity
Journal of Popular Culture
"Clockwork" Language Reconsidered
Clockwork" Language Reconsidered: Iconicity and Narrative in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange Robbie B. H. GoA Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is a novel structured around repetitive patterns, the most obvious being its three-part division, each beginning with an identical question ("What's it going to be then, eh?"). Philip Ray sees this tripartite structure as an imitation of the ABA pattern of the eighteenth-century Italian "da capo a…
Consuming Spaces
10.1080/103503300114531
Ideologies of 'Upgrading' in Singapore Public Housing
Studies of Singapore public housing have tended to emphasise the ways in which urban planning and housing policies have contributed to rapid infrastructural development in the 1970s and 1980s while maintaining racial harmony and providing affordable housing to the majority of the population. In the 1990s, a series of `upgrading' exercises in many Singapore Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates have signalled a change in the status and funct…
Ideologies of `Upgrading' in Singapore Public Housing
Studies of Singapore public housing have tended to emphasise the ways in which urban planning and housing policies have contributed to rapid infrastructural development in the 1970s and 1980s while maintaining racial harmony and providing affordable housing to the majority of the population. In the 1990s, a series of `upgrading' exercises in many Singapore Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates have signalled a change in the status and funct…
Shop-Soiled Worlds
10.1080/10350330220130340
Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text
(M)Othering the Nation
(M)Othering the Nation: Guilt, Sexuality and the Commercial State in Coleridge's Gothic Poetry Robbie B. H. GoA In an intriguing, if cryptic, notebook entry of 1799, Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks of "Commerce and its Effects disguised as a Fairy Tale" (CPW, I: 616). It is not clear if he is referring to the spell which commerce and its commodities are supposed to exert on human participants, although he does say in the poem "Religious Musings" t…
Textual Spaces, Social Identities and Race in Singapore Advertising
Advertising in Singapore contests certain notions that prevail in much of the current advertising theory - notions of the advertisement as `commodity sign', removed from the real particularities of social contexts, in order to interpellate consumer readers into a uniform set of `symbolic exchange values'. The influence of Marxist thought in such theory is clear. However, this method of analysis is not remunerative in the Singapore context, chiefl…
Contours of Culture
This volume discusses the urban history and cultural landscape of Singapore in relation to theories of textual dialogics, multiculturalism and the cultural and political unconscious. Multidisciplinary in approach, it takes as its data not only government policy and official discourses, and the more quantitative elements of population census information on religion, income, race and nationality, but also a wide range of related cultural discourses…
Christianity in Southeast Asia
This book briefly recounts the history of the establishment and expansion of Christianity in Southeast Asia from the colonial times onwards. With the exception of the Philippines, Christianity has been a minor religion in much of Southeast Asia, albeit one whose followers have sometimes had a disproportionate impact on education and other sectors of society. The author focuses on the current expansion of aggressive evangelical Christian groups in…
The Internet and Christianity in Asia
The internet has not as yet transformed the majority of Asian nations into open, liberal and democratic societies. Although it has had a significant impact, particularly on business, advertising expenditures, gaming, ICQs and other such aspects of consumption and entertainment, and in some parts of Asia (particularly in well-networked nations like Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and others), its development and impact h…
Reading Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles , one of his most financially successful stories, is not so much a fantasy of ‘policing’ Victorian society and its wealthy class (as it appears in part to be), as it is a subtle unwriting of a policed society and the related securities of semiotic, financial, professional, and scientific processes. This is effected through the sign of the detective — his depersonalization, his interchangeability …
Sword play
The abiding cultural significance of swords, in an age of technologicallysophisticated weapons of mass destruction, is as much a semiotic puzzle as it is a socio-psychological one. The semiotics of swords displays certain features — commodity fetishism, the business speak of ‘cutting edge’ performance, primitive vitality, and related elements — that reveal the doubleness of desire in market society, the simultaneous desire to negate the capitalis…
Imagining the Nation
Anglophone poetry has played a central role not only in the development of a national literature in Singapore in the first few decades after independence, but also in the articulation of a kind of national consciousness, a rhetorical rehearsal for an emergent nationhood. Examining the works of poets Edwin Thumboo, Goh Poh Seng, Arthur Yap and Lee Tzu Pheng - the first four Anglophone winners of the Cultural Medallion for literature, the Singapore…
Religious Sites
Religion and Non-hierarchy
The Anxiety of Influences
In its rapid socio-economic transformation over the four decades or so of its existence as an independent nation and in its quest to position itself as a competitive global nation and service hub, Singapore has come to embody many of the cultural phenomena of Asian modernity in an age of globalization. This has imposed a number of cultural, narrative and ideological influences on its writers. Young “post-65” Anglophone Chinese novelists like Coli…
Myths of reversal
There have been a variety of cultural texts that have demonstrated their license to treat time and causal order differently from the common linear conception, and this has been particularly true in a late industrial, late capitalist and digital era. From modernist texts that attenuate the subjective narrative point of view far beyond common experiences of time and space, to playfully schizoid texts that celebrate their narrative power over everyd…
Hillsong and "megachurch" practice
Megachurches" are congregations with a weekly attendance of at least 2000, by one definition and that have been established recently-many of them since the 1980s-in a variety of countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. They are often distinguished and distinguish themselves, from older (including other large) churches by a number of characteristics: a contemporary worship s…
Christian identities in Singapore
Christianity in Singapore is caught between the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand it is compelled (like all other religions practised in Singapore) to conform to the state's controls (most obviously in the form of the ‘Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act’, but also implicitly or explicitly spelt out in various policies on religious space and practices, multiculturalism, and even matters of financial governance and accountability). On the other…
The Cultural Politics of Christianity in India
Narrating Race
The essays in this volume deal with the complexities of race in the Asia-Pacific context. Social tensions concerning race and ethnicity continue to pose profound challenges to Asia-Pacific countries in various stages of development and modernisation. Issues such as social justice, identity-formation, marginalisation and alienation, gender and related issues, are inevitably implicated in the racial cultures of Asia, and where Asian diasporic commu…
Sociology (36 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · History (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Art (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Literature (16 works) · Aesthetics (14 works)