Joanne Leow

Biography

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of the literary, filmic, cultural, and artistic contestations that take place in spaces, ecologies, and racialized politics of capitalism and development. I am interested in how literature, film, digital texts, and art serve individuals and communities in these transnational and oftentimes violent spaces.

In this vein, I have written about literary and cultural texts from my birth country of Singapore, Southeast Asian, diasporic North America and global Asias. My intellectual work stems from the critical genealogies of spatial theory, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and the environmental humanities. My creative practice includes poetry, creative non-fiction, videography, and sonic collages from field recordings. My work is invested in developing digital tools and research creation that bridge the gaps between scholarly concerns and community engagement.

My published works include a multi-genre trilogy of books on postcolonial authoritarianism, extractive development, and living in the diaspora. The first is a collection of poetry, Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022), which employs the tropes of the tidal and the oceanic to trace trajectories and affinities between the Canadian prairies and Singapore. The second is an academic monograph, Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool University Press, 2024), which develops a critical vocabulary to understand how Singaporean writers, filmmakers, and artists work under spatial and socio-political pressures. The third is a creative non-fiction book, Exhumations: In the Body of a Petrostate (Alchemy/Knopf, 2026), where I draw on some of the themes of my earlier books. This hybrid memoir focuses on oil, sand, migrant labour, weapons, and censorship. It does so through the intimacies of caregiving, illness, and grief, refusing to disambiguate exploitative and extractive practices from deeply lived experiences.

As an unconventional digital humanist who believes in the importance of decolonial and transnational methodologies, I work to create digital projects, archives, and other forms of research creation in ways that are community-engaged and accessible. I am less interested in questions of "big data,” which risks subsuming the multiple possibilities of the humanities. Instead, I focus on deeply embodied “small” and “marginalized” data, and digital archiving of what might be deemed unimportant or ordinary.

I am the principal researcher of a SSHRC-funded study of the artistic, filmic, and literary depictions of coastlines in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vancouver. “Intertidal Polyphonies: Sound, Text, and Art" records and theorizes the sonic materialities, poetics, and politics of reclaimed land in all three sites. It will culminate in a digital resource of literary and cultural texts, field recordings, sound collages, and nine recorded roundtables with close to thirty writers, activists, artists, and academics. In Spring 2027, I will be curating a related group exhibition of video, sound, and sculptural art at Centre A, a contemporary art gallery in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown.

Other forthcoming work includes the edited volume Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore (under contract with Duke University Press) with Cheryl Naruse and Faris Joraimi, and a digitized archive of leftist student publications and ephemera from 1970s Singapore. I am also in the preparatory stages of a student and community-centric digital humanities project which explores diasporic Asian foodways and storytelling in collaboration with SFU’s Global Asia Program.

Publications

Books

Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petrostate. Alchemy/Knopf, 2026.

Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise. Liverpool University Press, 2024.

Seas Move Away. Turnstone Press, 2022

Book chapters

2026 “Reading and listening intently to David Chariandy’s Brother on the prairie campus” Call and Response-Ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation. Eds. Karina Vernon and Winfried Simerling, McGill-Queen’s UP.

2023 “Confabulation as Decolonial Pedagogy: Singaporean Literature, SG50 and SG200.” Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum Eds. Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, Cambridge University Press.

2021 “Theatre doesn’t change anything”: “Merdeka/ 獨立 /சுதந்திரம்” and the Performance of the Singapore Bicentennial. Raffles Renounced: Towards a Merdeka History. Eds. Lysa Hong, Sai Siew Min, Alfian Sa’at, and Faris Joraimi. Singapore: Ethos Books.

2019 "Transpacific Spaces and Asian Canadian Literature." In J. Lee (general editor), F. Cheung, J. Ho, A. Mannur, and C. Schlund-Vials (Eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature and Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP.

2019 "Transpacific Spaces and Asian Canadian Literature." In J. Lee (general editor), F. Cheung, J. Ho, A. Mannur, and C. Schlund-Vials (Eds.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature and Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP.

Journal Special Issue

2023 Wasafiri 116: Shorelines – Southeast Asia and the Littoral (edited with Nazry Bahrawi and the late Y-Dang Troeung)
https://www.wasafiri.org/issues/wasafiri-issue-116-shorelines-south-east-asia-and-the-littoral/

Peer-reviewed journal articles

2026    “Intertidal Data, Polyphonic Archives: Curating Asian Digital Art and Archives from the Diaspora.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Special Issue: “Digital Currents: Asian Diaspora and the Future of Visual Cultures” (in submission)

2024    “Islands, Lost and Imagined.” Canadian Literature 257 (2024): 30-35.2021 with Juria Toramae, ila, and Robert Zhao Renhui, "Field Notes, Fluidities, and Fictional Archives: Transmedial Photography and Singapore’s Altered Coastlines." Trans Asia Photography Review. Ed. Thy Phu.

2021 “Reading the Nonhuman.” in “small, deferred: On Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Writing” Ed. Vinh Nguyen. Canadian Literature 241: 128-130.   

2020 ""this land was the sea": The Intimacies and Ruins of Transnational Sand in Singapore." Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 6.2 Infrastructure

2020 "Reading New Asian Tropicalities in Contemporary Singapore." positions: asia critique 28.4

2020 "Lost Islands, Future Islands: Reading Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour Relationally." University of Toronto Quarterly. 89.1 Special Issue: "Literary Solidarities / Critical Accountability."

2020 "Circumventing the Archive: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and To Singapore, with Love." Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 6.1 Displaced Subjects

2018 "Lost Islands and Saltwater Cities." “The Minor Transpacific: A Roundtable.” BC Studies no. 198, Summer.

2017 "Renovating Vancouver: Transnational Constructions and Mortgages in Sachiko Murakami’s Rebuild." Journal of Asian American Studies 20.2: 139-160. Print

2015 “‘A delicate pellet of dust’: Dissident Flash Fictions from Contemporary Singapore.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 51.6: 723–736. Print.

2012 “Beyond the Multiculture: Transnational Toronto in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For.” Studies in Canadian Literature 37.2 (2012): 192-212. Print.

2012 “Mis-mappings and Mis-duplications: Interdiscursivity and the Poetry of Wayde Compton.” Canadian Literature 214 (2012): 47-66. Print.

2011 “‘Between home and home’: Crossings and Coastlines in the Poetry of Boey Kim Cheng.” Southeast Asian Review of English 50 (2010/2011): Print.

2010 “The Future of Nostalgia: Reclaiming Memory in Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City and Alfian Sa’at’s A History of Amnesia”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45.1 (2010): 115-130. Print.

Selected non-refereed publications

2018  "Gestures of Resistance: An Interview with Tan Pin Pin." Senses of Cinema.

2016 “An Interview with Denise Chong and Madeleine Thien” The Puritan, Spring Supplement
Creative Writing

2022 Seas Move Away. Turnstone Press.

2021 "My Elusive Petrofictions." Brick, a Literary Journal. Issue 107.

2021 "Eden." Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

2020 "This is Singapore": Watching Westworld in the Diaspora. Evergreen Review.

2019 "A Small Space." Brick, a Literary Journal. Issue 104