Port cities on the island of Singapore from the fourteenth century onwards have produced a dichotomy in literary representation. On the one hand, the city is monumental, its expanding physical infrastructure subsumed within solid historical developmental narratives in which dystopian and utopian visions of governance co-exist. On the other, the port offers the possibility of fluidity, an opening to the flows of peoples, culture, and trade. As a site of writing in many languages, Singapore exemplifies the concerns of world literature: interlinguistic practices, migration, networks of publishing and audiences in which the global continually returns.This chapter uses the concept of translocality to enable two intellectual moves. First, it moves us beyond a binarism between city and port, structure and fluidity in Singapore literary studies, in which literary texts are always seen as promoting fluidity as a critique of structure, rather than as acts of building, self-making and development. Second, the translocal experience of Singapore may offer a heuristic for the study of world literature, in which dystopian accounts of the imbrication of markets, reading publics, prizes, and creative writing programs with neoliberalism are often countered through utopian close readings of the transcendent possibilities of individual literary texts.

Legal documents of the late colonial period enable us to understand how this agency was negotiated in domestic and public spaces and how black women became key protagonists in their struggle for respect and survival. This essay examines the case of two female slaves who lived in the port city of Santa María de los Angeles de Buenos Aires who were victims of physical abuse by two male acquaintances: resulting in death in one case and in a state of coma in the other. This chapter discusses how the recollection of events by both female slaves and their respective assailants transitioned from the public space to the official legal space of power. It analyzes how both women, prior to the end results of the physical abuse they suffered, fought for their right to be believed and respected especially when it came to their material bodies. In the context of my discussion, the body is understood as a vehicle for thought and action while simultaneously implicated in power relations and social order and disorder.

This chapter introduces the topic, theoretical approach, and sources used to write the present history of Jeddah. The local perception of Jeddah as ‘different’ in a Saudi Arabian context serves as the point of departure for this undertaking. Building on the local view of a city hospitable to Muslim pilgrims, a number of practices are discerned which allow the characterisation of Jeddah as a cosmopolitan city with a distinct set of convivial practices. These will be explored throughout the book using a broad range of Arabic, Ottoman, and foreign sources, produced both by governments and individuals. These also include travelogues and local histories as well as material dealing with local traditions.