Robbie B. H. Goh

The Anglican Church in Singapore has a unique place both in the study of World Christianity and in the history of Southeast Asia. From its beginnings as a Church for colonial settlers, to its role as an unlikely agent of change in Singapore’s postcolonial transition, and its reinvention as part of a highly prosperous, hyperglobalized, supercapitalist, aspiration-driven modern state, the extraordinary trajectory of the Anglican Church in Singapore merits considerable attention.This study draws on archival material, incisive scholarship, and candid memoirs to chart the two-hundred-year history of Singapore’s Anglican Church, through world wars and communist insurgency towards hard-won national independence and the unparalleled social transformation of today, but this book goes far beyond mere chronological narrative. The author’s approach is inquisitive, rigorous, and ardently multidisciplinary, providing insights from theological, anthropological, political, and sociolinguistic perspectives.Homing-in on critically important and currently relevant themes, this book subjects the colonial-era Anglican Church’s social, ethnic, and interreligious engagement to scrutiny. The Church’s more recent and controversial commitment to the Anglican Realignment movement and its unexpected reorientation towards Pentecostalism are thoroughly investigated. The remarkable case of Singapore’s Anglican Church is indispensable for a complete understanding of World Christianity and Christianity in Asia today.

This multimodal approach to linguistic landscapes examines the role of linguistic and semiotic regimes in constructing landscape affect. Affect, as distinct from emotion, is object-oriented, and can be analysed in terms of structures of language and signs which operate on individuals and groups in specific spatial settings. Analysing a series of landscape types - including 'kawaii', 'reverenced', 'romance', 'friendly', 'luxury' and 'digital' landscapes - Lionel Wee and Robbie B. H. Goh explore how language plays a crucial role in shaping affective responses to, and interactions with, space. This linguistic and semiotic construction of different spaces also involves cultural contestations and modulations in spatial responses, and the book offers an account of the different conditions under which 'affective economies' gain or lose momentum.

Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan’s oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director’s postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a ‘reluctant postmodernist’. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it.

Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan’s oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director’s postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a ‘reluctant postmodernist’. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it.

This multimodal approach to linguistic landscapes examines the role of linguistic and semiotic regimes in constructing landscape affect. Affect, as distinct from emotion, is object-oriented, and can be analysed in terms of structures of language and signs which operate on individuals and groups in specific spatial settings. Analysing a series of landscape types - including 'kawaii', 'reverenced', 'romance', 'friendly', 'luxury' and 'digital' landscapes - Lionel Wee and Robbie B. H. Goh explore how language plays a crucial role in shaping affective responses to, and interactions with, space. This linguistic and semiotic construction of different spaces also involves cultural contestations and modulations in spatial responses, and the book offers an account of the different conditions under which 'affective economies' gain or lose momentum.

Captures how Indian Protestant Christians negotiate their religious and cultural identities within the Indian diaspora.This is the first comprehensive study of Protestant Christian religious identities in the Indian diaspora. Using qualitative interview methods, Robbie B. H. Goh captures the experiences of Indian Protestants in ten different countries and regions, describing how Indian communal Christian identities are negotiated and transformed in a variety of diasporic contexts ranging from Canada to Qatar. Goh argues that Christianity in India, developed within discrete and varied "ecologies," translates in the diaspora into a model of small communal churches that struggle with issues of community maintenance, evangelical growth, and Pentecostal influences. He looks at the significance of Christianity's "abject" position in India, the interplay and tension between evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, Pentecostalism's insistence on religious endogamy (particularly among women), intrareligious differences along generational lines, the actions of Hindutva hard-line elements, and other factors, in the construction and transformation of diasporic religious identities and affective attachments to India.