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Thank you @heatherchen_ for asking me for my views about @ITV's #TheSingaporeGrip and the foregrounding of white experiences during a very painful point of #Singapore's history. https://www.vice.com/en_asia/article/v7gk49/japans-invasion-during-world-war-ii-was-brutal-for-southeast-asians-does-this-tv-series-ignore-their-suffering
I'd like to acknowledge that Singaporeans in #Singapore aren't very much affected by #TheSingaporeGrip since it's not being aired here. Those most immediately affected by the failures of representation are East Asians and Southeast Asians in the UK, as highlighted by @BeatsOrg.
In defending #TheSingaporeGrip, Christopher Hampton pointed out that it's based on the satirical novel by JG Farrell, which he describes as "perhaps the most celebrated attack on colonialism by a British novelist in the 20th Century". https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-54085249
I hear his point, but while Farrell's work has its place in English literature, his novel was published in 1978. It's now 2020. We've long moved on from any need for white British people to attack or criticise colonialism on the behalf of the colonised.
Whether it's in terms of language and translation, movement and access, technology and know-how, there's no reason why the peoples of former colonies need white proxies to speak on our behalf. We're more than capable of criticising colonialism ourselves, clearly and directly.
This is not to say that white people aren't allowed to comment on or talk about colonialism at all. But the point is that it's high time for space and platform to be given to those whose stories have been neglected, sidelined, erased and actively suppressed for generations.
Even if what JG Farrell had to say was considered progressive and subversive in 1978, it's no longer progressive or appropriate in 2020 to privilege the stories and experiences of colonisers over the realities of the colonised. #TheSingaporeGrip doesn't acknowledge this.
Hampton, in defending #TheSingaporeGrip, appears to believe that as long as they aren't explicitly cheerleading for colonialism then it's not problematic. But privileging the stories of colonisers, however reluctant, over the realities of the colonised, is still colonialism.
In 2020 saying "the Brits fucked up in #Singapore during WWII" is not good enough. Expecting cookies for pointing this out, while relegating the pain of the colonised to the background, is out of step w/ how far we've come in conversations about colonialism, race, representation.
