A Good Trooper

Despite the deep historical interrelation between Malay literature and speculative fiction, the anthology Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore (2021) remains a rare example of contemporary sf written by Malay Singaporeans. In two of the short stories—Diana Rahim’s “Transgression” and Noridah Kamari’s “Second Shadow”—shadows assume an agency independent of their creators. While the shadows can and should be read as part of the larger ritualistic reinterpretations occurring in “Transgression” and the allegorical critique of state censorship in “Second Shadow,” I propose that the shadows also function as sites of speculative agency—whereby the shadows constitute agentic but nonphysical beings that are primarily characterized by their subordinacy, and argue that both short stories can be read as narratives where the protagonists wrangle with how to evaluate this form of agency. In “Transgression,” the protagonist evaluates the shadow based on its aesthetic value, which contributes to a larger discussion within the story about “performing” middle-class identity in contemporary Singapore and the need for agentic impulses to be about beauty (in the harmonic sense). In “Second Shadow,” the protagonist evaluates the shadow based on its military value, configuring the psychoanalytical subject as an uncontained battlefield occupied by distinct nonphysical but real agencies, and complicating our understanding of expression and repression. Together, these two stories demand novel and speculative ways of articulating anxieties about class within a contemporary Southeast Asian context.