Beyond the material constitutions of play spaces and the social compositions of the play community, how do D&D games in Singapore deal with Western fantasy? Racial histories are interconnected, but not identical, and race as reflected in the mirror of Western fantasy does not map neatly onto Singapore or to other parts of Southeast Asia. Even within Southeast Asia, Singapore itself occupies an uneasy position in relation to its geographical neighbors. As a Chinese majority country, Singapore’s policies and everyday politics, as mentioned earlier, racialize and disenfranchise poorer brown bodies, whether its own citizens or the million migrant laborers from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines who work in the construction or domestic work sector.
With this in mind, answering the question of how D&D is localized or transformed through an Asian context is difficult. To work through the questions in turn, one first asks: What constitutes Singaporean fantasy? What is considered canonical and influential in the way that we think about Singaporean imaginings of the nonmimetic, a world of otherwise? How, and should we, excerpt Anglophone Singapore from its position within the Southeast Asian region, keeping in mind the constructed nature of the nation-state—and even the region—as a project of imagined community?
I have a chapter included in a wonderful collection of works edited by Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter and Jose P. Zagal that deals with this topic, published by MIT. Very happy to have been included, of course, and to discuss D&D play cultures in Singapore!
Kellynn Wee 