Bringing together Dr Lilian Chee and Professor Rajeev Patke, this Critical Conversation circulates representations of the Asian city in contemporary literature. Focus is placed on stories and texts that trace architectural forms, site-specificity and spatial make-ups as backdrops that engender discourses and affective responses towards familiar places. Through the borrowed lenses of the “environmental unconscious” and in reference to Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the discussion will further speculate on depictions of the tropical landscape, alienation, social distinctions, fabrications between myths and imaginaries, and how gender is relegated and rendered. Where the city emerges as a product of these modern times, the urban condition provokes new relationalities between what we see and what we know that aim not to be settled but to be deliberated.

About Critical Conversations

As part of the CFA’s vision to nurture creative minds and inquiring spirits through the arts, the NUS Arts Festival presents Critical Conversations – a series of talks and panel discussions aimed at deepening the discourse and engagement with the themes raised during the festival. The series is moderated by Dr Kamalini Ramdas, NUS Arts Festival Academic Advisor.

Profiles

Dr Lilian Chee

Dr Lilian Chee is Associate Professor and Deputy Head at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore (NUS). She is a writer, academic, designer, curator and award-winning educator. A recipient of the University and Faculty Teaching Honour Rolls at NUS, she has lectured at the Bartlett, Delft, ETH Zurich, Melbourne, Oxford and the Berlage Centre. Her work is situated at the intersections of architectural representation, gender and affect in a contemporary interdisciplinary context. She conceptualized, researched and collaborated on the award-winning architectural essay film about single women occupants in Singapore’s public housing 03-FLATS (2014). Her publications include the forthcoming monograph Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces (Routledge) and a co-edited volume Asian Cinema and The Use of Space (Routledge, 2015). Lilian is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Architecture, Architectural Theory Review and Australian Feminist Studies.

Professor Rajeev S. Patke

Rajeev Patke is a Professor of English Literature in the Department of English at the National University of Singapore, and Professor of Humanities and Director of the Humanities Division at Yale-NUS College. He was educated at the University of Pune and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of a book on Wallace Stevens (Cambridge, 1985, rp. 2009), a book on postcolonial poetry in English (Oxford, 2006), a co-authored book on the literatures in English from Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2009), a book on modernist literature and postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh, 2013), and several co-edited volumes and two CDs of Singaporean poets reading from their work.