Humour and Heteroglossia in Suffian Hakim's Speculative Fiction About Singapore

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses Malay Singaporean author Suffian Hakim's novels The Minorities and The Keepers of Stories as speculative fiction because they feature the presence of magic and fantasy in an imagined Singapore. It draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of carnivalesque humour, dialogic imagination and heteroglossia to analyse how both novels challenge the official categorisation and management of race and culture by the Singaporean state (which designates its population as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other). Minorities pokes fun at Singapore's multiracial logic through the comic misadventures of its multicultural group of main characters and the pervasive bureaucracy that oversees all supernatural beings in the country. Keepers offers a dialogical and heteroglossic counterpoint to the monological narrative of self‐fashioning and nation‐building presented in founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs; it focuses on storytelling rituals and shared knowledge to build community rather than competitive masculinity.