본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

Becoming Modern: Where the Body Meets the Image — A Study of Advertisements in the 1930s Singapore Malaya Tribune

  • The Journal of Study on Language and Culture of Korea and China
  • Abbr : JSLCKC
  • 2026, (81), pp.477~499
  • DOI : 10.16874/jslckc.2026..81.018
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Study on Chinese Languge and Culture
  • Research Area : Humanities > Chinese Language and Literature
  • Received : July 10, 2026
  • Accepted : August 20, 2026
  • Published : August 31, 2026

jungin lee 1

1선문대학교 중한번역문헌연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines how modernity and locality were constructed in colonial Singapore and Malaya through advertisements on the front page of the Malaya Tribunein the 1930s. Modern life was configured through media such as advertisements, newspapers, and television even before it became a material reality, and vision functioned not as a natural sense, but as a trained perception organized by colonial power and media. Based on affect theory and the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of "becoming," this paper explores how imperial advertisements in colonial regions orchestrated bodies and senses. Advertisements did not merely convey product information; through repetitive imagery and page layouts, they organized the readers' desires, anxieties, lack, and consumption impulses. In particular, while Western bodies and lifestyles in colonial advertisements were presented as models of a universal modernity, colonial bodies could never be fully identified with them. Within this discrepancy and fissure, locality is understood not as a fixed identity, but as a process generated through the relations between bodies, media, environment, and the Other. This is analyzed through the case of the "Monico Cafe advertisement," specifically examining elements such as chop suey, satay, European-style meals, and operating hours until 2 a.m. By combining food, urban time, and the Western-style café space, these sensory assemblages are viewed as a "field of potentiality"—not a mere transplant or replication of imperial modernity, but a space generating new variations that cut across Malaya's climate, race, class, and language. The affective frictions produced by these assemblages are transmitted and accumulated among diverse bodies, revealing the microscopic traces of the generative process of Singaporean locality that cannot be reduced to any singular culture. This locality is not a pre-existing entity but a process of "becoming" in the Deleuzian sense, and it is argued that the microscopic traces of this becoming existed as a field of potentiality on the pages of these advertisements.

Statistics

  • 1 Viewed
  • 0 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2025 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
Basic Search Advanced Search