Cheryl Narumi Naruse

Biography

Cheryl Narumi Naruse (nah-roo-seh) is the 2024-2025 Jack an Nancy Farley Distinguished Farley Scholar in History. Dr. Naruse is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultural histories of capitalism, and genre studies.

Naruse’s first book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore (UC Press, 2023), studies the formation of Singapore's emergent soft power and cultural capital—or, "Global Asia"--that accompanies the nation’s authoritarian governance and accumulated wealth. Bringing a historical materialist reading practice to bear on a wide-ranging literary and cultural archive, the book argues that Global Asia is fueled by transnational imaginaries of capitalist desire, anti-Third World sentiments, and Euro-American interpretive practices. It moreover finds that the economic exceptionality of Singapore challenges the critical vocabularies and assumptions from fields that study postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Other current projects include a co-edited volume with Joanne Leow and Faris Joraimi, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore (Duke UP, under contract), a subversive travel guide that undoes the touristic fantasy of Singapore as a glossy, highly modernized playground for the rich. While at SFU, she is working on a second monograph, Cold Southeast Asia: Reading Postcolonial Singapore/Malaysia in Asian America, which explores the illegibility of Singapore/Malaysia—as the comparatively “cold” Southeast nations in the context of the Vietnam War—in Asian American and postcolonial studies.

Naruse’s publications include articles in biography, Genre, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias as well as chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics and Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts. She has also co-edited a number of special issues: "Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism" for ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature; a Periscope dossier “Global Asia: Critical Aesthetics and Alternative Globalities” for Social Text Online; and "Singapore at 50: At the Intersections of Neoliberal Globalization and Postcoloniality" for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Naruse earned her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, with a certificate in International Cultural Studies from the East-West Center. Her research has been supported by a postdoctoral fellowship with the Global Asia research cluster at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2015-16). For the MLA, Naruse served as the inaugural chair of the Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Diasporic Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Forum (2018-19). As former chair of the MLA Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee (2018-19), she led the Delegate Assembly through a discussion on power differentials in graduate education. Naruse has also served as a consultant reader for ARIEL and as the Southeast Asia section editor for Oxford's Year's Work in English Studies.