The Storytelling State

In The Storytelling State, Cheng Nien Yuan, a Singaporean performance scholar and dramaturg, charts Singapore’s development into a storytelling state since the 2010s. In such a state, public (auto)biographical stories of everyday people, elicited through visualized narrative interviews, proliferate the nation’s mediascape. Governmental agencies and government-linked institutions actively facilitate this phenomenon through campaigns and funding incentives. Examining several key campaigns from the period of 2011–2021, Cheng shows how state and society collaborate to cultivate an intimate, confessional public. Taken together, these stories generate a new paradigm of communicating social policy and the “Singapore Story” by mapping the national archive onto everyday bodies. Bite-sized pieces of consumable lives are marketed as authentic windows to the private self, producing ways of being, doing, and feeling in the nation, in accordance with contemporary societal concerns.

This book enters a larger debate about storytelling’s impact around the world in the digital age. Singapore’s storytelling state functions within a global network of performing memory with new media. Its origins can be traced to popular American models of oral history-telling as seen in StoryCorps and Humans of New York, with their techniques appropriated for a Singaporean audience. Yet, even when well-intentioned, the claims of such projects of giving voice to the non-elite and the marginalized can be undermined by injurious effects that are not unique to the Singaporean context. At the same time, the embodied and emotional nature of these performances make the absolute control of meaning difficult. Often, they reveal more than they should, transgressing the normative demands of the storytelling state. At stake here are performances of identity, mobility, and belonging. When the national stage is set for life itself, what does it mean to have a life?