"The odd place of Singapore on the world historical stage of the late 20th century is the subject of The Asian Modern. Tracing the transformation of the city-state from a period of intense cultural homogenization in the 1960s-70s to one of managed multicu

"In this provocative study, C. J. W.-L. Wee interrogates conventional views of Singapore - as undemocratically capitalist, incoherent urban, inauthentic modern - moving beyond clich� to plumb the unique, paradoxical exuberance of this off-shore cosmopolis

"Situating cultural studies in the midst of a complex array of 'Asianizing', 'reethnicizing', and 'relocalizing' forces, Wee has become a kind of Garcia-Canclini of the Pacific Rim, tracing a paradoxical situation in which 'exuberant modernization' in Sin

C. J. W.-L. Wee is an associate professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and was formerly a fellow in the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India and at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (2003) and the editor of Local Cultures and the "New Asia" The State, Culture, and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (2002); he also is the editor of Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun (2002), and is presently editing Contesting Performance Global Genealogies of Research with two other scholars . His recent research interest concerns questions of modernism, postmodernism and the contemporary arts and culture in the East/Southeast Asian context.