This collection is an overt rejection of the maxim everything is political as one that reduces both things and politics to each other. Rather, it attempts to meditate on the possibilities of both things and poli through meanderings into various forms, including essays, creative-critical pieces, prose-poems, and thinking-fictions: and it posits that these possibilities appear to us as encounters between ourselves and works, other people, the worlds in which we live; bearing in mind that such moments cannot be known a priori, can at best be felt, intuited, as they are happening, often remain hidden from us even after they have taken place, returning as ghostly-traces... to be read.
Jeremy Fernando's political vision is incisive, inventive, and insidious.
Neil Murphy, Professor of English & Toh Puan Mahani Idris Daim Chair Professor,
Nanyang Technological University.
With characteristic flamboyance and slyness and verve, Jeremy Fernando has produced a political theory of Singapore that may properly be called, i.e., that in some sense invents or reinvents, Singaporean Political Theory. How, the book seems to cry, suppose you could know anything at all about the political if you have not first missed understanding Singapore?
Ira Allen, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Northern Arizona University,
author of Panic Now? Tools for Humanizing, The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory, and sundry other works.