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Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization
Auflage
1
Ort / Verlag
New York: Columbia University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2021
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful
figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as
Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who
has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms
and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in
late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine
indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural
and political force of the horror genre. In Alluring
Monsters , Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak
found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society.
She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting
anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and
indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of
Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction. The
pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive
gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by
putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the
pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within
postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to
histories and theories of decolonization. From the horror films
made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to
contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and
Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how
postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In
tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with
postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals
how a "pontianak theory" can reshape understandings of anticolonial
aesthetics and world cinema.