Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City

Forthcoming January 2024

Edited by Timothy P Barnard
With contributions from Ruizhi Choo, Anthony Medrano, Miles Alexander Powell, Esmond Chuah Meng Soh, Nicole Tarulevicz, Jennifer Yip, Faizah Zakaria, Timothy P Barnard

Modern Singapore is the Garden City, a biophilic urban space in which society is placed within a managed environment that includes a variety of animals from mosquitoes to humans to polar bears. This book brings together historians to contemplate this human-animal relationship and how it has shaped the society—socially, economically, politically and environmentally—particularly in the past half century. It is a work of historical and ecological analysis, in which various institutions, perspectives and events involving animals provide insight into how the larger society has been formed and developed in Southeast Asia in the last half century. The interaction of all Singaporean creatures thus provides a lens through which we can understand the creation of a modern, urban nation-state, reflecting the outcomes of the Anthropocene in local history. 

Timothy P. Barnard is an associate professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore, where he specializes in the environmental and cultural history of island Southeast Asia.

Publication Year: 2024
288 pages, 299mm x 152mm
35 b/w images
Paperback
ISBN: 978-981-325-238-7