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The city state of Singapore, which recently celebrated 50 years of independence, still curiously retains a nineteenth century colonial penal code that criminalizes homosexuality. While state censorship discourages its citizens from engaging in public discourse that explores the implications of this penal code, colloquially known as 377A, discussions on the topic are still visible. High profile attempts to repeal the law through challenging the Singapore Constitution are reported in mainstream media outlets, and the artistic community also supports the repeal of the penal code. One of the most powerful instances of this was W!ld Rice's 2013 all-male production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest followed by Moisés Kaufman's Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (the former played to international acclaim in Macau in 2014 and Brisbane in September 2015). This essay examines the relationship between art and state policy in Singapore by considering how artistic expressions that address social and cultural anxieties contribute to rather than subvert conversations about social policy-making. In this case, the seemingly comical Wilde plays produced an especially serious and nuanced analysis of the off-stage consensus problems in Singapore, among the LGBT community, heterosexual citizens, and the government. The plays effectively expose and articulate the deeply ambivalent sentiments that have come to characterize the 377A debate.

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The publication in 2008 of John Watkins’s special issue for the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” opened up the formal aspects of the ambassador’s office and official channels of diplomatic negotiation to a complex sociocultural landscape underlying the processes of diplomacy-in-the-making. The field of New Diplomatic History has since burgeoned. This current special issue hews closely to the cross-disciplinary nature of newer diplomatic history, and it responds to critical challenges that have recently emerged in scholarship, particularly the need to balance both breadth and depth of historical and cultural analysis. This volume considers how English institutional and sociocultural networks informed diplomatic practice in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and how diplomatic thought, representation, and the forging of international relations were interpreted within various English communities. The collection takes special interest in how “ideologies of diplomacy” were formed, negotiated, and articulated within and beyond formal diplomatic spheres. Drawing on various elements of international relations theory, the essays address the ambiguous and contradictory elements of diplomatic reciprocity, explicating the tensions between diplomatic ambition and local governance.