In December 2025, I visited The Albatross File: Singapore's Independence Declassified, an interactive multimedia exhibition organised as part of a series of events commemorating 60 years of statehood. The exhibition is based on The Albatross File: Inside Separation, a collection of recently declassified Cabinet papers and notes kept by Dr Goh Keng Swee, Singapore's first Finance Minister, which details the history of Singapore's separation from Malaysia in 1965. Information in the exhibition was organised in the form of a countdown timeline, from merger in 1963 to separation two years later. The exhibition also highlighted ‘key players’ in the narrative of separation, presented as though they were dramatis personae. Images were interspersed with digitalised documents and voice recordings; these materials were also used to create a film, which featured actors reenacting key scenes. The albatross is an allusion to Samuel Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which a sailor kills an albatross (regarded as a sign of good luck) and is then forced to wear its carcass around his neck once misfortune befalls the ship. Singapore has successfully cast off its burden, and in the past 60 years, established itself as an independent and prosperous city-state. Cheng's book begins where the story of the exhibition ends: with footage of Lee Kuan Yew weeping when announcing the separation during a press conference (p. 11). The Storytelling State is an incisive and mesmerising exploration into the performative mechanisms and strategies through which the Singaporean government ratifies, transmits and consolidates an idealised vision of the state through life (hi)stories that proliferate public consciousness via the nation's media ecosystems. The storytelling state, Cheng argues, deploys myriad forms of narratives in which the personal accounts of individuals are contextualised and situated within a larger nexus that ‘subliminally reifies the state itself’ in exercises of ‘politically organized subjection’ (p. 4). Through wide-ranging case studies from between 2011 and 2021, the six chapters of the book outline how Singapore operates as a storytelling state. Throughout the book, Cheng also strives to articulate instances where the affective, embodied and ephemeral nature of performance exposes the inherent paradoxes of state-sanctioned narratives. The first chapter establishes theoretical frameworks for conceptualising the performativity of the interview as a method for eliciting life stories, with a particular focus on the role of the interviewer, before moving to situate this framework within the Singaporean context of The Oral History Centre and a series of interviews in Straits Times. However, by separating the theoretical framework from the local Singaporean context and mainly engaging with Anglo-American sources in the first half of the chapter, Cheng risks: (i) privileging theory over practice; and (ii) not fully engaging with how specific localised practices of life-storytelling in Singapore not only exemplify the discursive terms proposed in the first half of the chapter, but may also propose new terms for thinking about the performativity of oral history narratives. Chapter 2 considers the way that out-of-bound markers attempt to establish normative codes for existing in the storytelling state, regulating not only political discourse but also embodied and affective modes of being. Chapter 3 extends this examination of what it means to live ‘in the norm way’ by focusing on examples from the Singapore Memory Project, which Cheng suggests proposes ideal modes of citizenship that align with policy concerns even as she identifies moments of tacit resistance (p. 54). Chapter 4 develops the discussion on passion in the previous chapter to explore the concept of ‘care’ in the context of neoliberalism; in particular, how it supports what Cheng calls the ‘moral neoliberal’ who operates on affect, communitarianism and unwaged labour (p. 123). Chapters 5 and 6 are counterpoints to the previous chapters in different ways. Chapter 5, palpably shorter than the others, examines the narratives told by migrant workers in Singapore, whose outsider status is inextricably linked to precarity and instability. In Chapter 6, Cheng considers the graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew as a text that explicitly rejects the normative strategies of the storytelling state by encouraging its readers to critically assess the historiography of Singapore's postcolonial development. This book offers unique intellectual contributions to performance studies in its consideration of the ways in which concepts and values that buttress the Singaporean state are enacted through storytelling practices that are affective and embodied. The book also effectively correlates personal life histories of individual Singaporean residents with the larger objectives of the state, demonstrating both how the personal is made political as well as how the political is sustained by the personal. Far from adopting a distanced, hegemonic viewpoint, the author weaves in her own subjective experience growing up as a Singaporean, which brings her interpretive insights and positionality as a subject and citizen to the fore. Cheng explicitly engages with a wide-ranging selection of media campaigns in Singapore that took place in recent memory, expanding definitions of narratives by identifying the different modalities through which narratives are constructed and sustained in the storytelling state. More importantly, the book activates consciousness in its readers of how Singapore continues to operate as a storytelling state (hence my anecdote about the Albatross exhibition) and the possibilities and limitations these mechanisms offer for the continued construction of state-sanctioned narratives. Even as the book advances Cheng's astute interpretive insights so persuasively, I wondered, however, whether it might have benefitted from the incorporation of ethnographic methodologies such as interviews to better express the ground-up perspectives of the participants in these media campaigns. This approach might have allowed readers to engage in greater detail with the process through which narratives are put together rather than to treat these accounts simply as products that arise at the behest of the storytelling state.
Roweena Yip (Tue,) studied this question.