What’s it like to be a Singaporean intellectual? An interview with Chua Beng Huat
Kuan-Hsing CHEN and Daniel PS GOH
ABSTRACT Professor Chua Beng Huat is an internationally well-known and respected sociologist and cultural studies scholar from Singapore. In early 2015, his long-time collaborator and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies co-founder, Kuan-Hsing Chen, and his former student turned present colleague, Daniel Goh, interviewed Chua on the eve of his retirement as the Head of the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. This wide-ranging interview tracks a colourful biographical trajectory that expresses both the contradictions of the illiberal capitalism underpinning Singapore’s rapid development and the strategic dilemmas and tactical travails of an intellectual clinging on to the representations of truth.
Keywords: Singapore, Intellectuals, Politics, Biography
Notes on contributors
Kuan-Hsing Chen teaches in the Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His most recent monograph is Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010, Duke University Press).
Daniel PS Goh is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Convenor of the Cultural Studies programme at the National University of Singapore. His most recent work is the edited volume on Worlding Multiculturalisms: The Politics of Inter-Asian Dwelling (2015, Routledge).