Exhumations
Inside the Body of a Petrostate
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Remove from Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Exhumations
Pre-order for $32.96
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Joanne Leow
About this listen
"What unknowable chemical? How slow was this damage, this violence? . . . How might any of us stay uncontaminated by all that was built around us?"
Sleek and verdant, the city-state of Singapore has long been admired on the global stage as a lush utopia, a well-connected trade port and the jewel of Southeast Asia. Yet this carefully pruned exterior conceals the country’s crude construction—oil is the blood that's run through Singapore’s hidden veins for decades, while sand and migrant labour has allowed for its rapid development and expansion. The upkeep of this sanitized public image has also relied crucially on the complicity and regulation of its body politic.
Years after her departure to Canada, a place likewise indebted to fossil fuel extraction, Joanne Leow continues to live with Singapore’s authoritarian policies embedded within her skin. With unflinching clarity, she exhumes the histories and ongoing realities of various state initiatives that seek to control both the public and the private aspects of its citizenry, examining her work as a journalist for the state-controlled media and chronicling the daily hypervigilance and unconscious suppression of anything that might be deemed as dissidence. In this intervening time, during which she dealt also with serious illness and bereavement, Joanne reflects upon the various ways in which this oppression continues to exist in her bones, a slow poisoning only truth-telling can expunge.
In searing yet lyrically gorgeous prose, Exhumations catalogues the many things that are produced under pressure. Bit by bit, Joanne exposes the petrofiction at the heart of Singapore’s being and traces the unruliness of thought daily growing within her, difficult to ignore and impossible to repress.
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.