Written by Leonard Yip
Dated 1 Jul 2024

In 2000, Marion Shoard theorised the landscape between city and country as deserving of its own geographic category: ‘edgelands’. These terrains are increasingly common in the Anthropocene, as modernisation encroaches on nature, springing unique ecologies into being through the confluence of human and more-than-human. 

Although the city-state of Singapore is an edgeland writ large, compressing rainforests between dense urban infrastructure, no scholarship to date has read Singaporean landscape literature as an edgeland. To make visible a nascent tradition of Singaporean edgeland art in light of this critical absence, I read trans-modal cultural activity – poetry anthologies, photography albums and blog posts – against the British writing following from Shoard’s theory, exploring how they are illuminated by, but not obedient to, these texts. Following Donna Haraway and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s calls for multidisciplinary writing forms which register the personal impacts of the Anthropocene, I overcome this critical absence also by weaving my own field notes of edgeland experience into my analyses.

I trace the trail of Singaporean edgelanders; from mourning the desolation of their edgelands, to celebrating its richness and sacralising its space. In doing so, I uncover the twin languages of grief and hope by which to read these complicated, mixed landscapes.  

/ MAPPING THE EDGELANDS