South Asian Gothic

This book is the first attempt to theorise South Asian Gothic production as a common cultural landscape, taking into account both the historical perspective and the variety of media texts. The volume consists of fifteen chapters by experts in film, literature and cultural studies of South Asia, representing the diversity of the region and a number of ways in which Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic, narrative practice, or a process of signification, where conventional Gothic tropes and imagery are assessed anew and global forms are consumed, appropriated, translated, transformed or resisted. The volume investigates South Asian Gothic as a local variety of international Gothic and part of the transnational category of globalgothic, contributing to the ongoing discussion on the need to de-westernise Gothic methodologies and ensure that Gothic scholarship remains relevant in the culturally-diverse modern world.

A collection of scholarly articles on the manifestation of the Gothic in South Asian cultures. South Asian Gothic is the first attempt to theorize South Asia and its gothic production as a cultural landscape in its own right. The volume consists of fifteen scholarly articles that describe the many ways that the Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. The Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic and narrative practice, as well as a process of signification where conventional gothic tropes and imagery are reappropriated, resisted, and transformed. The volume investigates the South Asian Gothic both as a local variety of international gothic, as well as a part of the transnational category of "globalgothic," contributing to the ongoing discussion about the need to de-westernize gothic methodologies.

This volume addresses cultural and literary narratives of trauma in South Asian literature. Presenting a novel cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory, the essays within this volume study the divergent cultural responses to trauma and violence in various parts of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, which have received little attention in literary writings on trauma in their specific circumstances. Through comprehensive sociocultural understanding of the region, this book creates an approachable space where trauma engages with themes like racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment. With case studies from Kashmir, the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, and armed conflict in Nepal and Afghanistan, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of literature, history, politics, conflict studies, and South Asian studies.

Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond explores ghost movies, one of the most popular film genres in East and Southeast Asia, by focusing on movie narratives, the cultural contexts of their origins and audience reception.

This dynamic multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the uncanny, eerie, wondrous, and dreaded dimensions of oceans, seas, waterways, and watery forms of the oceanic South, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans, and around Australasia, Oceania, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa. Presenting work from leading scholars, the chapters contend with the contemporary fears and repressions associated with the return of environmental traumas, colonial traumas, and the spectres of the precolonial deep past that resurface in the present. The book examines the manifestations of these Gothic aesthetics and propensities across a range of watery spaces – seas, oceans, waterholes, and swamps – in vessels, ports, shorelines, journeys, strandings, and transformations, in amphibious bodies and the drowned, all of which promote haunted engagement with the materiality of water. This collection renews the interdisciplinary breadth of Gothic criticism and the relevance of Gothic affect and sensibility to understanding the histories and cultures of the oceanic South through an exploration of the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans, waterways, and aqueous forms of the Southern Hemisphere, haunted by colonial and precolonial imaginings of the Antipodes, the legacies of imperialism, and the “double vision” between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies, and the encroaching menace of climate change. Comprising diverse contributions from screen, literary, and cultural studies, environmental humanities, human geography, and creative practice in ecological sound art, and poetry, the collection examines the uncanny and the sublime in watery fictions and authentic settings of a range of aqueous southern forms – ocean surfaces and depths, haunted shallows and reefs, moist mangroves, moss and lichen, the awesome horror of tidal apocalypse. This book will be illuminating reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and Indigenous studies.

The Korean Wave in Southeast Asia offers fresh details and new perspectives on the globalization of Korean popular culture, better known as ‘Hallyu’. Focusing on the dissemination, localization, consumption and fandom of Korean TV dramas, films, pop music and other forms of youth culture within the cultural geography of Southeast Asia, the chapters in the book offer a compelling analysis of the globalization of Hallyu and detail the various social and cultural mechanisms involved. Deeply accomplished, this book will be a valuable resource for scholars interested in cultural and social change in Southeast Asia, as well as for graduate and undergraduate students learning about popular culture in Asia. Nissim Otmazgin Chair of the Department of Asian Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author, Regionalizing Culture: The political economy of Japanese popular culture in Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2013). This book proves to be an important addition to the growing scholarship on the Korean Wave and the resulting new pop culture trends in Southeast Asia. In addition to introducing new concepts for further comparative research, the roster of case studies on Hallyu consumption and production in the region (informed by interdisciplinary expertise) offer readers fresh analyses and diverse experiences of the phenomenon. The publication of this collection is timely for our new course elective focusing on the ‘Korean Wave’, in which this book will certainly be a required reading. Sarah Domingo Lipura Associate Director, Ateneo Initiative for Korean Studies, Ateneo De Manila University (Philippines)

The essays in this collection acknowledge the rich Gothic tradition in Asian narratives that deal with themes of the fantastic, the macabre, and the spectral. Through close analyses of Asian works using the theoretical framework outlined by Gothic criticism, these essays seek to expand the notion of the Gothic to include several popular Asian works. Broadly divided into essays on postcolonial Asian Gothic, Asian-American Gothic, and the Gothic writings of specific Asian nations, this volume covers a wide variety of Asian texts. The essays of Part One demonstrate the flexibility of Postcolonial Gothic literature in adopting divergent or even contradictory ideologies. Part Two evokes the Gothic as the theoretical framework from which to interrogate the writings of Asian-American authors Maxine Hong Kingston, Sky Lee, lě thi diem thuy and David Henry Hwang. Part Three studies the Gothic tradition in the national literatures of China, Japan, Korea, and Turkey.

The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.