Conference Abstracts and Bios (listed in first name alphabetical order)
Abhishek Sarkar (Jadavpur University, India)
Bengali Ghosts and Demons in a Carrollian Dreamworld: Fantasy and Satire in Konkaboti
My paper will explore how the Bengali novel Konkaboti (1892) by Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay (1847-1919) indigenizes the Carrollian dreamworld by making use of motifs from Bengali folk tales (e.g., magical roots, a damsel hiding in an oyster, shape-shifting) and introducing supernatural beings from Bengali folk tales (e.g., a man-tiger, a pernicious she-ghost, a demon called khokkosh). In keeping with traditional Bengali folklore, the ghosts and demons of Konkaboti are quite ludicrous and not downright scary as in the classic Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. This novel does not imitate the plot and characters of the Alice books but retains the Carrollian tropes of the there-and-back-again quest, a dreamworld governed by alternative logic, along with the combination of indigenous folkloric wonders and newly invented ones.
In addition, Konkaboti uses anthropomorphic/supernatural characters to launch a direct and vigorous social satire, something that is absent from the Alice books. The framing narrative, functioning in the manner of the realistic social novel, indicts evils of the contemporary Hindu society such as the wedding of girls to old men for dowry and the high-handedness of community leaders. In continuation of this polemical stance, within the central dream sequence two Bengali ghosts (who have floated a mercantile firm called ‘Skull, Skeleton & Co.’) represent the anglicized Bengali gentlemen of the time, a group of mosquitoes who seek to ban inter-regional mobility among Indians may be recognized as the exploitative colonizers, while a she-ghost mouths aggressively the rationale cited by Hindu traditionalists in favour of widow immolation. The violent confrontation between fictive worlds in Konkaboti, together with its unmistakable satirical impulse, may be seen as the strategy by which the Bengali novel acknowledges the Carrollian template and simultaneously undercuts it.
Dr Abhishek Sarkar teaches at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He specializes in the literatures and cultures of early modern England and colonial Bengal. He has received the Charles Wallace fellowship and completed a major research project and a minor research project sponsored by the Government of India.
Ali Salami, Haniyeh Asadi (University of Tehran, Iran)
Shamanistic Practices Among the Southerners of Iran as Depicted in Gholamhossein Saedi’s Ahle Hava
The southern islands of the Persian Gulf of Iran apart from the marvellous nature, have an affluent tradition and history with unique cultural practices. One of these is the religious practices of shamanism. Shamans and shamanism have existed in all cultures throughout history and shamanism incorporate differently in each culture and nation that believe in supernatural and magical powers. Some of the southerners and islanders of Iran believe in the Zaar winds and those possessed by winds. The kinds of winds that are mysterious and ethereal and human beings are defenceless against them except to surrender themselves to the winds or rescue themselves by making sacrifices and being treated by shamans. Dr. Gholamhossein Saedi, Iranian author and psychologist in his monography Ahle Hava published in 1940 writes about his journey to the south of Iran and explores the spiritual culture and ceremonies of the southerners. He manifests and explains their beliefs in the winds that reincarnate in the human bodies and control their souls and psyches. Then he writes that the way of getting unchained from the winds is to be healed by the Baba or Mama who are like shamans and through a special ceremony, they conjure up the wind from the body of the wind-possessed. This study will treat the shamanism of southerners of Iran to show how shamans exploit their supernatural powers on those who have become submissive to the winds and if shamans have specific transcendental abilities or they are neurotics; the ancestral, religious, and geographic aspects will also be analyzed to explain the unknown and mysterious essence of Zaar winds; moreover, it will manifest how the Zaar winds can impact people and control their psyche according to Saedi’s ethnography.
Dr Ali Salami is an Iranian author, Shakespeare scholar, and Associate Professor of English Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Tehran. An internationally published author, Salami has written extensively on gender, discourse, Shakespeare, postcolonial literature and human rights.
Haniyeh Asaadi is a literature researcher who has completed her studies at the University of Tehran. Her research is mainly focused on feminist utopianism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, and Arthurian literature.
Ananya Roy (University of Delhi, India)
Forests and Fortresses: The Impenetrable Domain of Spiritual Force Associated with Nature in Indian Horror Culture
Whether it is a haunted castle that has been abandoned for ages or a forest that harbours deep secrets, lore surrounding such places have time and again been portrayed through tv serials, films and documentaries in India. Despite being a niche trope in Indian horror culture, yet being strangely of interest to paranormal investigators these forts, castles and woods act as formidable forces against mankind even at times pushing entire packs of settlement and converting them to abject ghost-towns. Urban legends featuring spooky temples (Kiradu), forts (Bhangarh), and restricted forests (Lambi Dehar mines) have forever been desolate owing to their infamous socio-history. The ghats of Varanasi, aligning closely with the holy river of Ganga, is home to negative forces owing to the presence of Harishchandra ghat, where the funeral pyre never extinguishes. India, as mystical as it is, has always been home to the spirituals and superstitions, the river being at the confluence of life and death, similarly in terms of ecological perspective acts as a magnet for forces both good and evil. Non-believers might choose to blame it on mere speculative acts of irrational idiocy yet this paper tries to establish a correlation with the occurrence of such supernatural incidents within the ecological domain and makes an effort in understanding why some places are better closed off to human intervention. Science might drown such allegations under its tumultuous tide of opposition but the viscerally palpable cannot be proved in graphs rather felt and experienced via belief and fear.
Ananya Roy has completed her masters in English Literature from Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. Her focus on research is widespread ranging from the renaissance to the modern contemporary literary world, more significantly on gothic, horror, noir, crime, speculative and science fiction(s). Her works have been previously published on e-journals like IJELLH, IJOES, CLRI, IJECLS. She is a blog-writer and a regular contributor of enriching articles on debates and essays in print magazines.
Aparajita Hazra (Diamond Harbour University, India)
Of Roopkatha and Itihasa: Reading the Nation in Fairytales of Bengal
Rabindranath Tagore believed that Bengal’s Folklore needed to be showcased enough so that the hegemony of European folktales could be wiped off the colonized mind. I, for one, being a Bengali Indian, have grown up with a lot of folklore in my head and heart. These Fairytales or Roopkathas would teem with ghosts, ghouls, demons, monsters and frightful creatures, making them enticing for anticipating young minds. Yet there is more to Roopkatha than a mere repertoire of supernatural beings at war with the princely protagonists.
Cultural legacy as it is, folktales can often be the signifier of ulterior motifs. Folklores and fairy tales have often metonymised certain signifiers that have often covertly critiqued socio-political issues that are at times problematic enough not to end up in discourse. The ubiquitous-looking/sounding ghosts are often signifiers of things that otherwise tend to get swept underneath the carpet. Thus, ghosts like the Shakchunni insinuated sequestered widowed women who were considered inauspicious in traditional Bengali lore, thereby exposing the patriarchal hegemony that was the order of the day in 18th and 19th century Bengal. Mamdo Bhoot, another kind of spirit found in fairy tales, (Bhoot meaning Ghost) were saidto be Muslims who have turned spectral. This again indicates religious insularity.
This paper will take up Thakumar Jhuli, (Ganny’s Bundle of tales) a compendium of Roopkathar Golpo (Fairytales) from Bengal put together by Dakshina Ranjan Mitra Majumdar in 1907, to analyse how the innocuous sounding Fairytales for children hid scores of historio-social allusions that go a long way into the formation of a nation’s identity.
Prof. Dr Aparajita Hazra is Dean of Arts and Professor in the Department of English in Diamond Harbour Women’s University, West Bengal, India. She has been widely published and has presented papers widely in India, France, New Zealand, Macau, Malaysia, Canada, Ireland, Georgia and Scotland. She has authored The Terrible Beauty, Her Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Brontes: A Sorority of Passion, Marlowe, the Muse’s Darling and The Art of Articulation from Macmillan Publishers. An Anthology on the Gothic is on the way. She is the recipient of the Noble Asian Educational Leader Award, 2020, the Asian Education Award 2021, the National Faculty Award for 2021-22.
Aqsa Eram (University of Lucknow, India)
Gothicized Colonial Encounters: Treatment of Indian Folklore in Flora Annie Steel’s Short Fiction
A mysterious bridge-diver who bears an uncanny resemblance to a god, a snake charmer’s tale that seeps into reality, and a fakeer’s drum that beats even after his death – not only do these incidents imagined speak of folkloric narratives, animistic beliefs, myths and traditions of Indian culture, but they also represent the colonial encounters between British and Indians. In the exploration of this encounter, the paper will examine the intermingling of Indian folklore and the Gothic traditions of the coloniser through three short stories called ‘The Blue-Throated God’ (1897), ‘The Fakeer’s Drum’ (1897) and ‘The Mercy of the Lord’ (1915) by Flora Annie Steel, who was born in England but lived in British India for over two decades.
In the late nineteenth century, the English wrote numerous short fictions based on their travels, experiences and accounts of the British Raj (1958-1947), which is a period of colonization and direct rule in India. With many of them being gothic tales of the strange and the supernatural, often appropriating myths and traditions of the natives, a closer study reveals the perspective of the colonisers. The Gothic traditions of Victorian England bring scepticism to the folk legends of the colonized country, stereotyping the natives by espousing generic statements as ‘truth’, and thus fixing their identity. The imagined encounters exoticise the Indian landscape and, in turn, construct the Indian Gothic under imperial contexts, which is expressive and revealing of their fear of being an ‘other’ in a land strange to them.
Aqsa Eram is a PhD research scholar and a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, India. Her areas of interest are gothic studies, postcolonial studies, Indian literature in English, and popular literature.
Bohyun Kum (Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea)
Analyzing the Grotesque Elements of 1930’s Korea Detective Novels
In the 1930s Korea, the mysterious story which called ‘Geogi (怪奇)’ was produced and consumed actively. At this moment, ‘Geogi’ had both folklore and modern materials. It had inherited the folklore story ‘Gidam (奇談)’ which was told in the past. Also, it was influenced by the erotic-grotesque code of the western culture and Japan which named as ‘ero-gro(erotic grotesque).’ It spread out based on media and also could find in literature too. For example, Nae-seong Kim was the author who wrote various horror fictions around late 1930’s. One of the well-known writers of detective novel in colonial period Korea, Kim depicted crime scene with modern outcome such as arts, exhibitions, love affair etc. However, Kim wrote an exception which adopted the folklore theme: The Painting of a White Snake (白蛇圖). This short story reminds of snake folktale which spread out as a horrific story in colonial period Korea. Kim focused on creating the mystery and ambiguousness by combining snake motifs and female shaman. Although Kim used these images of snakes and showed them in his story, he also left the modern elements too. In short, The Painting of a White Snake mixed the folklore motif and modern circumstances of 1930’s. Moreover, Kim tried to elevate horror novels and detective novels to the aesthetic area of literature; Kim’s short stories of late 1930’s are the outcomes of his efforts. This study will analyze the narrative of horror during 1930’s Korea which mixed folklore and modernity and also which took one’s own line.
Bohyun Kum is a PhD Candidate at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea. She has a MA in Korean Language and Literature of Sungkyunkwan University. Her master’s thesis dealt with acceptance and translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome in colonial Korea. Her former research was about female bodies in paintings which used in detective fictions. Her research interests include uncanny spectacles such as circus, theater, and exhibitions in early 20th century novels and play.
Chairat Polmuk, Saowapark Khanman (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)
Guts and Roots: Plant, Female Monstrosity, and Modernity in Thai Folklore and Cinema
Sitisiri Mongkolsiri’s Inhuman Kiss (Saeng Krasue 2019) centers on a triangulated romance between two men and a nocturnal female spirit known in Thai folklore as krasue. The Thai title, Saeng Krasue, which translates as ‘light of krasue’ indicates the glowing internal organs that marks the usual manifestation of this female ghost as she leaves her headless body and hovers through the air in search of impure food such as human feces and animal corpses. In this romantic rendition of krasue folklore, plants also play a vital role. Drawing on Thai plant lore of ‘wan krasue,’ a kind of herbs that occasionally glows at night and is believed to feed on blood, the film’s focus on this monstrous plant foregrounds the relationship between female abjection and natural wildness. Set in a fictional rural hospital during the Second World War, the film subtly explores the idea of wildness and spectral alterity in the context of Thai modernity and wartime violence.
Taking Inhuman Kiss as a point of departure, this paper combines film analyses with ethnographic studies to further examine a vexed relationship between plants, female monstrosity, and modernity in Thailand. Literary and online narratives of wan krasue and other kinds of ghostly plants will be read alongside filmic representations of plant horror and historical records of botanical science in Siam/Thailand to shed light on the discursive and affective constitutions of Thai modernity through the making of its vegetal and spectral Other.
Chairat Polmuk is a lecturer at the Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, where he teaches Southeast Asian languages and literature, cultural theory, and media studies. He received a PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture from Cornell University. His research focuses on affective and intermedial aspects of post-Cold War literature and visual culture, especially in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.
Saowapark Khanman is a PhD candidate in folklore studies at the Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University. She is working on her doctoral project on the relationship between folklore, haunting, and urbanism in Thai horror cinema from late 1990s.
Chiho Nakagawa (Nara Women’s University, Japan)
Japanese Island Folk Horror/Mystery in the Twenty-First Century
The Folklore Society of Japan, led by Yanagita Kunio, embarked on an extensive research project to learn and record various customs, religions, and superstitions in isolated islands throughout Japan in 1950. Written around the same time, Yokomizo Seishi’s Gokumon-toh (Gokumon Island) is set in an island in the Seto Inland Sea, effectively highlighting peculiar customs to create one of the most highly acclaimed mysteries in Japan. An island can conceal exotic, mysterious—and sometimes offensive to the modern sensibility—customs, and even monsters or gods. Being separated by sea and contrasted with the modernized outside world, islands are seen as archives of folklore. These interests into inlands continue today, providing materials for horror and crime fiction in Japan, a country of an archipelago, consisting of 6852 islands in total. In this research, I will focus on one of the Gothic concerns, boundaries, or the dichotomy of inside/outside, to discuss twenty-first century Japanese island folk horror mystery novels, Kokushi-no-shima (2001, Island of Heretics) by Ono Fuyumi, Magatori no gotoku imu-mono (2006, One to Be Avoided Like an Evil Bird) by Mitsuda Shinzo and Yogen-no-shima (2019, Prophesy Island) by Sawamura Ichi. The inside/outside dichotomy in these novels does not only figure in a physical/architectural/geographical sense but a psychological/cultural sense as well, and addresses social issues that Japan is currently facing, such as depopulations, gender problems, and environmental pollution.
Dr Chiho Nakagawa is an Associate Professor at Nara Women’s University in Nara, Japan. Her research interests include American women’s literature, Gothic novels, and more recently, crime fiction. Chiho has published in various international and Japanese journals and contributed book chapters, including ‘Safe Sex with the Defanged Vampires: New Vampire Heroes in Twilight and the Southern Vampire Mysteries’ (2011). Her contribution to Asian Gothic lies largely in her discussion of Seishi Yokomizo—who turned her interest into crime fiction—which appeared in Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies (2013). She also translated David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas to Japanese (2013).
Christie Rachel Saji (English and Foreign Languages University, India)
Kuttichathan in Popular Culture: A Negotiation between Obedience and Agency
This paper attempts to analyse the *kuttichathan myths of Kerala and its popular representations. Kuttichathan is a gothic child spirit who is known for his mischief and cruelty. Kuttichathan usually caters to the wishes of the manthravadi (magician) who is serving him or has subordinated him. And there are traditional families in Kerala who have been serving him for years. At the same time, Chathan also has a Godly form, with agency and power, as the son of Lord Shiva and Parvati or Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu. Thus, temples in his name are common. Oscillating between a divine and diabolical figure, Chathan’s status in the traditional topography is ambivalent. But when the popular culture appropriated chathan myths, he became a children’s friend and hero. Kuttichathan, himself represented as a child, becomes the naughty and humorous hero that every child wants to befriend. This paper analyses the transformation of the gothic figure into a children’s hero, who satisfies children’s desires and dreams, solves their troubles and sorrows. Even though a manthrvadi can subordinate him, the chathan in these representations has a will to act on his own. The paper attempts to understand the negotiation between agency and subordination, freedom and slavery that the figure of Chathan embodies as he traverses from a mythical landscape to popular representation. The paper also tries to analyse the importance of childhood or children in the cultural process of chathan becoming a familiar, loving and domestic figure.
*the ‘kutti’ in Kuttichathan is a word in Malayalam used to refer to a child. It denotes chathan as a child.
Christie Rachel Saji is a Research scholar from English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, India. She is doing her research on childhood innocence under the guidance of Professor N. Ramadevi, in the department of Indian and World Literature. She has done her Masters in English from Hyderabad Central University, India.
Dipankar Dey, Bibhuti Bhusan Biswas (Central University of Jharkhand, India)
Horror Episode of Aboriginal Sentinelese Tribe in North Sentinel Island, Andaman Islands, India
The fate of the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands remained a mystery in the days following the devastating Tsunami of 2004, when it became clear the extent of the devastation and agony inflicted upon the islands of the Indian Ocean. The Sentinelese are arguably the most genuinely isolated people on Earth. They may have lived in the Andaman Islands for up to 60,000 years and are believed to be directly related to the earliest groups of humans to leave in Africa. They might have had minimal interaction with outsiders for thousands of years if their language was so distinct, even from other Andaman islanders. The islanders are unmistakably very healthy, alert, and prospering, in sharp contrast to the two Andaman tribes that ‘benefited’ from Western culture, the Onge and the Great Andamanese, whose numbers have fallen and who are now primarily reliant on state handouts for survival. The Sentinelese are frequently mischaracterized as ‘savage’ or ‘backward,’ like many other isolated tribal people with a dreadful reputation. However, it is comprehensible why they are hostile to outsiders, given that the outside world has only provided them with violence and disrespect. A recent gothic and horror incident was reported from North Sentinel Island, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where an outside trespasser stepped into this Island and Sentinelese killed him. However, this paper has highlighted an ethnographic study of the Sentinelese’s horror episode of existence in the modern world.
Dipankar Dey is a PhD Research Scholar in the Department of International Relations of Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. He is working for his Doctoral Thesis on Indo-Pacific. He has published four research papers and five book chapters in reputed journals and books. He also presented several papers in national and International Seminars.
Dr Bibhuti Bhusan Biswas is an Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. He has ten years of teaching and research experience. Dr Biswas has published four books, 25 research papers and articles in prestigious national and international journals. He also contributed 20 chapters in edited volumes. Dr Biswas presented more than 50 papers in national and international seminars and conferences.
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay (Manikchak College, India)
Definitely Not Just a Gentleman’s Game: Haunted Nature of Cricket in Indian Popular Imagination and its Representation in Urban Lores
Cricket has always been much more than a game in India due to the game’s British origin. Apart from being a point of contact between the colonizing Britishers and the colonized Indians, the game eventually emerged as a signifier of the Indians’ way of answering back to the empire, particularly after the success of Indian cricket team in the World Cup Cricket of 1983. Subsequent to this success, Indian cricketers, especially the batsmen, became legends or living legends with extraordinary and at times magical cricket skills, in the popular imagination of Indians. This paper will study how Indian popular culture reflected such legendizing of cricketers by analyzing a short story and a Bollywood film featuring magical cricket bats. In the Bengali short story ‘Uncle Tarini the Sportsman’ (1985) by Satyajit Ray, the protagonist single-handedly brings victory against a British cricket team by using a cricket bat imbued with the cricket skills of former legendary Indian cricketer Ranjitsinhji. Likewise in the Bollywood film Chain Kulii ki Main Kulii (2007) a young cricketer rescues Indian cricket team during their hour of crisis using a bat rumored to have the magical power of the cricketer Kapil Dev, who led India to victory in 1983. Close-reading these narratives this presentation will explain how the past heroism of legendary Indian cricketers who excelled at this imported game despite their underdog status has given cricket a haunted status in the popular imagination of India, leading to the creation of urban lores.
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Manikchak College, affiliated with the University of Gourbanga, India. His research articles have been published in various peer-reviewed journals. He has contributed chapters to collections published by Salem Press, McFarland, Edward Elgar Publishing, Routledge, Peter Lang, and Lexington Books He has presented his paper on the film Bulbbul in GIFCon 2021.
Devaleena Kundu (UPES, India)
Lore of the ‘Chudail’: Analysing Notions of Evil and Monstrosity in Netflix’s Bulbbul
Throughout India, particularly northern India, the chudail or the demon-woman is a dominant figure in popular mythical imagination. Depicted as a woman with scruffy long hair and backwards-turned feet, the chudail is the archetypal femme fatale. She is the ‘monstrous-feminine’, to borrow Barbara Creed’s (2007) term, the embodiment of death and evil. Opposed to popular belief, however, the construction of the chudail in Anvita Dutta’s movie Bulbbul (2020) permits the existence of ‘good’ chudails. Dutta’s movie, while adapting the chudail myth for a contemporary audience, explores the manner in which the female body becomes a site of patriarchal oppression. With close reference to the movie, this paper explores how death becomes the medium through which the oppressed woman finds a way to regain her social agency. The paper claims that the chudail’s act of inflicting death on its prey functions as a folkloric system of justice whereby evil is punished and the destitute offered divine sanctuary. The study will undertake an in-depth analysis of the death scenes in Bulbbul to show how the event of death translates into a metaphor for the consumption of evil.
Devaleena Kundu is an Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Studies, UPES, Dehradun, India. Her research primarily dwells on literary and popular cultural representations of death, dying and crime. Her latest work, ‘From Villains to Clowns: Adapting Serial Killers to Internet Memes’ is part of the edited volume, Serial Killers in Contemporary Television: Familiar Monsters in Post-9/11 Culture (2022). She is currently co-editing a guest issue themed ‘Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture’ for MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.
Elizabeth Cherian (English and Foreign Languages University, India)
Devotion to Deification: Act of Surrender in the Folk Art Form Theyyam
Theyyam, a traditional performative art form endemic to the northern part of Kerala popularly performed in many temples and ‘kaavs’, is a theophanic art form with elaborate costumes, drum beats, chants and grandiloquent makeup wherein the performer undergoes months of physical and spiritual preparation. The figure of theyyam (both the performer and the performance are called theyyam), the shamanic figure, blends the nature of fierceness, strength and power of God. This folk art form is also a form of worship wherein both divinity and devotion are manifested through a performance. This paper highlights Theyyam as an example of the expressive form of mysticism in which God is manifested verbally and physically. I shall argue how the act of surrender turns the artist into deity. To quote AK. Ramanujan, ‘a bhakta [devotee] is not content to worship a god in word and ritual nor is he content to grasp him in theology, he needs to possess him and be possessed by him.’. In Theyyam, the artist becomes Muthappan (God) himself. More than entertainment, the art form is steeped in folklore, myths, religion and spirituality. The performer’s merit is not judged on the basis of the performance but on the connection with God. This paper argues that through the act of surrender, the art form elevates from a temple performance to an intense expression of divinity.
Elizabeth Cherian is an Indian research scholar at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. She is working under the supervision of Prof. G.Thirupathi Kumar for her PhD on the refugee literature with primary focus on self-narratives. She completed her postgraduation at Stella Maris College, Chennai and did her under graduation at Assumption College, Kerala. She worked as an Assistant Professor on-contract at St. Teresa’s College, Kerala. She has keen interest in the cultural art forms of Kerala.
Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez (Spelman College, USA)
Colombian Cinematic Transformations of Japanese and Korean Horror
The influence of Asian horror films (specifically the so-called J-Horror and K-Horror) is evident in two Colombian films that have transformed and revitalized the genre in the country: Al final del espectro (2006) by Juan Felipe Orozco and El páramo (2011) by Jaime Osorio Márquez. Both movies narrate stories that are specific to the Colombian context, and its armed conflict (1960-2016), using aesthetics and tropes borrowed from Asian horror cinema. The results are films that, at the same time, distort and pay homage to J-Horror and K-Horror. In this presentation I will analyze this two films vis-a-vis iconic cinematographic pieces of Japanese and Korean horror cinema, focusing on the way in which the movement towards this type of cinema distorts the Hollywood model, prevalent in horror cinema and highly influential in Latin America. In addition, I will stress the political uses of these films in creating new avenues for staging the unrepresentable (war crimes, torture, incest), opening novel avenues for understanding violence in the country.
Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez is a Colombian writer and academic who teaches at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. He researches Latin American Gothic, Transnational Horror Cinema, Colonial Processes of Exclusion, and Cultural Migration. Eljaiek-Rodriguez is the author of Selva de fantasmas. El gótico en la literatura y el cine latinoamericanos (2017), The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinema (2018), Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature (2021), and Baroque Aesthetics in Contemporary American Horror Cinema (2021).
Isaraporn Pissa-ard (Chiang Mai University, Thailand)
The Political Role of Oral Storytelling, Folklore, and the Gothic in the Thai novel Juti [Rebirth] (2015) by Uthis Haemamool
This paper investigates the integration of oral storytelling and folklore with the novelistic tradition in Thai author Uthis Haemamool’s Juti [Rebirth] (2015), a political novel that seeks to subvert and unmask dominant master narratives and to advocate utopianism. The first episode of the novel foregrounds the role of an archetypal storyteller—someone who belongs to the oral tradition and recounts her/his stories to a living audience to make sure that past memories are not forgotten. The storyteller in Juti’s first episode is an old woman, a grandmother whose role is reminiscent of that of a historian, a chronicler, and, to a certain extent, a Gothic heroine. The episode opens with the long welcome speech of the grandmother upon seeing a group of young children, who soon become the audience of her tales. She then recounts to her young audience what she claims to have encountered through her ‘immortal’ life. The tales she relates bring to mind Buddhist, superstitious, animistic beliefs, and Gothic tropes while at the same time implicitly critique ruling class dominance and male hegemony as well as promote a non-anthropocentric outlook. The utilization of the oral storytelling tradition in a contemporary novel like Juti demonstrates that the rise of the novel in the modern era does not lead to the death of the oral storytelling tradition. Furthermore, the novel draws attention to the role of folklore and the Gothic in establishing an alternative hegemony and underscores the potential of folklore in helping the oppressed articulate their demands and desires.
Isaraporn Pissa-ard (PhD) teaches undergraduate courses in world literature, mythology and folklore, and translation at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Her research interests include comparative literature, Thai political fiction, critical folklore studies, children’s literature and literature for young adults.
Jan Marvin A. Goh (University of Santo Tomas, Philippines)
Entering the Gothicized Realm of Lagim: Towards a Ludological Exploration of Philippine Folkloric Materialization through a Trading Card Game
In December 2020, Fictionminds Games Inc., a group of artists and game designers, launched Lagim, a trading card game that is based on Filipino Folklore/ Folklore in the Philippines set in the early 17th century Philippines. Lagim features some Filipino mythological creatures and courageous humans blessed with knowledge of enchantments. These characters are represented through gaming cards which are divided into Lagim (or the combination of horror, terror, dread, and gloom) and Barrio (or neighborhood) cards. Although Filipino card games like this are full of extensive representation of folkloric elements, studies on folklore remain residing in realms of the anthropological, literary, filmic, and videogame studies that constantly attempt to theorize and re-appropriate the idea of G/gothic in local texts that have their own systems of articulating lagim, pangamba, katatakutan, misteryo, hiwaga, kababalaghan, kagila-gilalas and other nominal variations from all cultural corners of the Philippines. This work-in-progress foregoes the usual digital bases of utilizing Ludology in reading videogames in exchange of providing a reading of Lagim as a game which encompasses multiple avenues of deeply entangled but subversive relationships between Philippine folklore and the G/gothic.
Jan Marvin A. Goh is an Instructor from the University of Santo Tomas. He graduated with an MA in English Language Studies at University of Macau where he wrote his thesis on ecogothic, and an MA in Language and Literature in Philippines where he wrote a 400-paged post/structural auto/biography of a renowned Filipino writer. Turning to Ludology is his recent attempt in embracing his inner gamer identity that was set aside due to the demands of life.
Jeonghoon Ryu (Korea University, South Korea)
The Haunted House and Gothic Narrative in the Ghost Tower by Ruiko Kuroiwa
Ghost Tower (1899) by Ruiko Kuroiwa (1862-1920), known as a best-seller in the Meiji period, was an adaptation of A Woman in Grey (1898) by Alice Muriel Williamson (1869-1933). The original story was unknown for a while, but research by Shigeo Fujii and Hideo Ito finally revealed that the original story was A Woman in Grey. Ruiko’s Ghost Tower is a story in which the victim appears as a ghost, unlike A Woman in Grey, where the perpetrator of the murder appears as a ghost. It can be said that this is a good example to prove the fact that the Eastern and Western recognition systems for the existence of ghosts are fundamentally different. However, the depiction of the haunted house, which is the background of the story, remains the same as in the original work. Therefore, in this presentation, I would like to clarify that, unlike in the past, haunted houses were embodied as spaces closely related to hygiene and money, referring to newspaper articles about haunted houses of the time. A haunted house, which is imagined not as a space where grudges dwell like a Sarayashiki, but as a space where an epidemic spreads or is devastated by human greed for money like Ghost Tower, is the representation of a haunted house in Gothic horror novels. Along with the genealogy of the Meiji era, I think it will show a cross section of the Meiji era.
Jeonghoon Ryu holds a PhD in Japanese literature, and is a research professor at Korea University’s College of Liberal Arts. He specializes in the study of Japanese literature and culture. His recent research focus is on Japan’s overall horror culture, including traditional Japanese ghost stories.
Jihu Park (Korea University, South Korea)
Elements of Western Gothic Novels Appearing in Cannibal Ghost Stories about Nanyo
Nanyo (南洋) is a term referring to Southeast Asian island countries, including Micronesia today, and was an epistemological space concept formed in Japan in the modern era. Since period forming the modern nation-state, Japan has produced countless images of Nanyo regions through various cultural works. At this time, the most prominent image they had created was a savage representation of the space called Nanyo. The savagery of the South Seas, such as Where Crocodiles Are, Where People’s Skin is Dark, and Where They Prey on Wild Animals and Humans, was enough to cache people’s eyes. Among them, the fear that cannibals live in particular quickly spread through various media, contributing to the formation of Japanese-style cannibal ghost stories about Nanyo. Importantly, the area called Nanyo was unfamiliar to the people of the Meiji-Taisho period, so the colonial-style ghost stories about it were represented in the form of a haunted house that can be found in Western gothic novels. This presentation summarizes the generation and spread of Nanyo’s cannibalism and ghost stories that appear in a variety of literary works of the Meiji-Taisho period, and grasps the influence of Western Gothic novels in them. Furthermore, let’s examine the ideological influence of cannibals and ghost stories on the Japanese at the time.
Jihu Park is currently a graduate student in the Department of Japanese Literature at Korea University. He is majoring in Japanese Modern and Contemporary Literature-Culture, and researching modern Japanese Nanyo Literature. He is concentrating on the relationship between the literary influences of East Asian countries under the keywords of civilization and barbarism.
Kahyun Lee (Korea University, South Korea)
Gothic in Mishima Yukio’s Work: Relationship between Women and Home
Gothic novels are characterized by environments of fear, supernatural events, and past intrusions into the present. In general, physical memories of the past are included, especially buildings that have been ruined as evidence of a previously prosperous world, which is now in decline, have important implications. Thus, the background includes castles, religious buildings such as monasteries and monasteries, and cellars, and the meaning of ‘house’ in the study of Gothic literature occupies a key position. Female Gothic came from these Gothic novel genres of castles, dungeons, forests, and hidden corridors. Female Gothic narratives focus on topics such as the persecuted heroine, who escapes from her villainous father and cannot find her mother, and the control of a male-centered society becomes the central background of female Gothic literature. Mishima Yukio’s play Tropical Tree (1960) depicts the collapse of a family with the theme of incest and companion suicide in the background of modern Japanese family after the war. Heroin, a stay-at-home mom, is a submissive possession of her patriarchal husband in a closed space, while as a mother, she shows the madness of torturing her children by imprisoning them in a prison of ‘home’. Female Gothic can be found through the appearance of women expressed in hysteria in the space of ‘home’, which symbolizes a male-centered society.
Kahyun Lee holds a PhD in Japanese literature, and is a research faculty at the Department of Japanese Language and Literature of Korea University. She specializes in the study of Japanese Modern Literature. Her recent research focus is on literary representation of female characters.
Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand)
From Folklore to Folk Horror: The Medium (2021) as a Case for Thai Folk Horror
A large proportion of Asian Gothic texts engages consequently with folklore, used both as an inspiration for their stories and a framework against which these texts are read. This is especially the case with horror films which tend to favour supernatural plots. But while many Asian horror films are derived from folklore, very few can be described as folk horror, according to the current understanding of the term. Released in 2021, The Medium (Rang Zong)is a Thai-Korean co-production, a brain-child of a Thai director, Banjong Pisanthanakun, and a Korean producer, Na Hong-Jin, better known as a director of The Wailing (Gokseong). Shot in a format of a mock-documentary, The Medium takes place in the Northeastern Thai region of Isan, often stereotyped in Thai media as an underdeveloped area rife in superstition. A film crew from Bangkok sets out to document routine tasks undertaken by a local medium only to be confronted with what seems a case of full-blown demonic possession which ends rather badly for everyone involved. The paper situates the film in the context of Thai cinema, where horror films are almost always based on folklore, and argues that not every production derived from folklore must necessarily be viewed as a work of folk horror. The Medium is used to illustrate the difference between Thai horror films which use folklore elements and Thai folk horror films, and to discuss how the folk horror mode operates in Thai cinema. In doing so, the paper investigates the possibility of amending the current definitions of folk horror with a view of making them more inclusive and more understanding of non-western contexts.
Dr Katarzyna Ancuta is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary Gothic/Horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. Her recent publications include contributions to Film Stardom in Southeast Asia (2022), The Transmedia Vampire (2021), The New Urban Gothic (2020) and B-Movie Gothic (2018). She also co-edited two collections – Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2016) and South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (2022).
Leonie Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
‘A phone was found inside her’: Techno-Animism as Trauma in the Folklore of Ju-On: Origins (2020)
In Ju-On: Origins, after murdering his adulterous wife and burying the foetus she was carrying, Keiichi returns home to the sound of a ringing telephone. Following the wire like an umbilical cord, he locates the landline inside his dead wife’s stomach. The phone has replaced the foetus, and they are unified as objects that appear inside her body without being placed there by Keiichi—at once a symbol of animation and interpersonal disconnect.
First, this paper contextualises the scene within the late-capitalist reification of Japanese indigenous spirituality known as techno-animism—that is, the symbolic animation of technology in a commercial context. Then, it reads the appearance of the phone as a techno-animist rendering of the ubume narrative from Japanese folklore, in which the foetuses of women who die in childbirth are often replaced with inanimate objects. Instead of substituting the foetus for the usual rock or bundle of leaves, Origins exchanges it for a telephone—technology being the new seat of the animistic worldview.
Then, the paper discusses the animating potential of ultrasound technology in cultural conceptions of the foetus as a living being. When Keiichi is visited by the posthumous foetus, he is haunted by projections of an imagined future made possible by technological interventions into the process of pregnancy, which present ultrasound images as the first stage of life. The interchangeability of foetuses and techno-animist commodities in Origins therefore identifies technology as the animating factor in both scenarios.
Leonie Rowland is a PhD candidate with the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, researching commodity animism in the Japanese Gothic. Her work can be found in Japanese Horror Culture: New Critical Approaches, Fantastika Journal, The Dark Arts Journal, and is forthcoming in Gothique II.
Li-hsin Hsu (NCCU, Taiwan)
The Goddess of Silkworms, Mulberry Trees, and the EcoGothic
The paper looks at the connection between Chinese folklores and the EcoGothic, examining the tales of the silkworm goddess in ancient Chinese mythologies and folklores from the perspective of the human-nonhuman alliance (as well as its betrayal). The presentation focuses on the two versions of the story of Canshan, the goddess of silkworms, one from in an earlier collection of folklores The Soushen Ji (In Search of the Supernatural), a compilation of stories and legends about gods, ghosts, and other supernatural phenomena by a Jin Dynasty historian Gan Bao (around 350 AD) in China, and the other one from The Taiping Guangji (The Extensive Records of the Taiping Era, around 978 AD), a later collection of stories compiled in the early Song dynasty. It explores how the imagery of silkworms, in their various mythical manifestations, conveys on a deeper level the ecological intimacy between the human and the nonhuman entanglement and its evolution in literary works. The presentation will compare the two diverging representations of Canshan, in order to reconsider the ecological significance of Canshan in our age of Anthropocenic crisis. While silkworms in ancient Chinese literature and the sericulture they embody have been associated with agricultural advancement through the human domestication and extraction of natural recourses, the anthropocentric interpretations of the moral lessons conveyed in both tales about the economic value their industry and productivity symbolize, is complicated and problematized by the girl-horse metamorphosis and their symbiotic relationship with mulberry trees. The presentationhopes to show how the half-horse, half-woman hybridity of Canshan, and the double role of silkworms both as the producer of silks and consumer of mulberry trees, speak to the EcoGothic potentiality of Asian folktales in their illumination of the environmental relations of predation, consumption and exploitation.
Li-hsin Hsu is Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include Dickinson studies, Romanticism, Ecocriticism, and contemporary Taiwan poetry. She has guest-edited journal issues on transcultural-related topics, including a special issue on ‘Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations: 1776 to the Present’ (2018) and a special issue on ‘International Dickinson: Scholarship in English Translation’ (2020). She is currently editing two special issues on EcoGothic and Asian Gothic related topics for two international journals in Malaysia and Taiwan.
M. Ramakrishnan (Central University of Jharkhand, India)
Changing Perception on the Horror Stories of Deities and Ghosts in the Context of the Impact of Modernity in a South Indian Village – An Emic Perspective
Deities and ghosts are occupying an important place in the socio-cultural and spiritual life of people not only in rural settings but also in the urban, and they are inevitable cultural categories for anthropological and folklore studies. Everyday life in rural India is full of stories and narratives of people’s encounter with these entities in different forms and shapes. Irrespective of their difference, both deities and ghosts tend to scare people, make them to produce horror stories and confine them within their house-hold areas. However, the changes in the village settings with the introduction of electricity, television sets and radio programmes have made great influence on the attitudes and perspective of people on the nature of deities and ghosts, and it has resulted in the people’s stories and narratives apart from their belief system. Here is an example from a small village called Uremelalagian in Tenkasi District of Tamil Nadu, and this study presents the vivid account of the socio-cultural and spiritual life of the people, that has been witnessed by the author as a member of the village, which tells that even after the arrival of modernity, the people have not given up fully because of various reasons. Drawing primary data from the village as a resident scholar, this study critically evaluates the overall impact of the modernity provided on the rural (and/as well as the urban) life and presents some of the horror stories told by village members which are noteworthy and they must be highlighted in order to understand the cultural uniqueness and universality of cultural categories of deities and ghosts. The horror stories collected from villagers are analyzed for understanding the related concepts, the nature of language used, the elements that constitute the horror, the logics of claim and disclaim, the rationalistic intervention due to modern education, etc.,
M. Ramakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Folklore, in the Department of Tribal Studies, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, Jharkhand (India). He received academic degrees from St. Xavier’s College, Tamil Nadu, MPhil and doctoral Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and post-doctoral from Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai. He is also the recipient of the Presidential Award for Young Scholar in Classical Tamil.
Megha Solanki (English and Foreign Languages University, India)
Myth, Belief and Journey in the Afterlife: Tracing Freedom in Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride
This paper takes into consideration beliefs in the afterlife and journeys through fantastical spaces, tracing the relations between these concepts to arrive at the idea of freedom explored in Yangsze Choo’s novel The Ghost Bride. Set in colonial Malaya of the 1980s, Choo’s novel maps the journey of Li Lan as her soul traverses through the shadow space of the afterlife, escaping from the forced ghost marriage she finds herself locked into. This paper examines Choo’s expansion of mythical spaces in Chinese lore through the creation of the shadow space, Plains of the Dead, inhabited by the ghosts who wait for reincarnation. It also analyses Li Lan’s encounters with the living and the dead and the mythical figures in-between in relation to this fantastical space. By delving into these aspects, it addresses the ideas of beliefs and disbelief that colour the lore surrounding death and the afterlife. It comments on the hierarchical system in the afterlife that reflects the reality of the living world and Li Lan’s negotiations with both. The objective of this paper is to understand how the fantastical space and the encounters within, aid in the development of Li Lan’s belief system and creates a notion of freedom that is tied to the mythology that Li Lan is embroiled in. It does this through looking into the Chinese folklore regarding ghosts, ghost marriages and the afterlife and using contemporary studies on fantastical spaces along with theological perspectives on the notion of belief.
Megha Solanki is a PhD scholar in the Department of Indian and World Literatures at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research is in the field of migration literature and looks at the works of the author Xiaolu Guo, focusing on ideas of affect, aesthetics, and aspirations in migrant life. She is also interested in popular culture, urban lore, and fantastical spaces.
Muhammed Shahriar Haque (East West University, Bangladesh)
Bhoot Legacy: Gothicizing folklore in Pett Kata Shaw
The concept of bhoot has been quite prevalent in the Indian sub-continent, yet somehow it had not quite emerged as a genre across the platforms in Bangladesh until the launch of Bhoot FM 12 years ago. Among the numerous OTT programmes, one that has made a name for itself is Pett Kata Shaw, which uses Bengali folklore elements in the gothic tradition to petrify the audience. Grounded in rural and semi-rural settings, rather than modern urban locals, folklore beliefs are passed on from generation to generation through oral tradition. The backdrops of each of the four stories deal with particular aspects of Bengali folklore. The gothic elements in Pett Kata Shaw undergo negotiation through the notion of willing suspension of disbelief so much so that it becomes difficult to determine the real from the supernatural, and therefore, the mythical takes a life of its own making everything seem so credible. The Oscar-nominated director, Nuhash Humayun, who is the son of a very famous Bangladesh writer and director Humayun Ahmed, has an uncanny knack for exploring the eerie based on familiar myths in Bengali folklore. This paper attempts to explore how the gothic elements of the four stories of Pett Kata Shaw negotiate using the concept of willing suspension of disbelief to make the supernatural or bhoot seem natural.
Muhammed Shahriar Haque, PhD, is the Executive Director of East West University Center for Research and Training (EWUCRT). He has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and co-edited three books. Furthermore, he is the editor of the peer-reviewed East West Journal of Humanities and the producer and assistant director of the documentary film Life after Grey (2015). His research interests include critical discourse analysis, film and media studies, comics and graphic novels, educational technology, and photojournalism.
Shun-yu Wan Nicola Ulaan (City University of Hong Kong, HK)
Schizophrenic Women in the Urban Gothic Hong Kong in A Very Short Life and Dream Home
Beneath the visible layers of the glitz and glamour of Hong Kong always yields the unanticipated. In Hong Kong Category III movies, the city is often depicted as the urban gothic in terms of unheimlich, in which dismal encounters arising from the defamiliarization and disenchantment with social codes can easily lead to dreadful dangers. Particularly, within this urban gothic possessed by heightened turmoil and fearful imaginings made manifest in one’s physical surroundings, violence and horror is often grounded in the strangely vulnerable female protagonists. Preoccupied by social inequalities, precarity and the peripheral, Becky Lee and Cheng Lai-sheung in Dennis Law’s A Very Short Life (2009) and Pang Ho-cheung’s Dream Home (2010), who fail to reconcile traumatic repression are both accused of their antisocial and violent behaviours. In this beat, this paper first seeks to argue that images of urban space presented in both movies always vacillate between ‘the reassuring solidity of knowingness and the sinister voids of unknowingness’ (Pile, 265), which articulate the Hong Kong-style urban gothic. The boundaries of urban space become the contested sites of anxieties over its crime, corruption, child and sexual abuse, serial killers and dystopic narratives. As a result, the urban gothic operates as a telling metaphor for all the possible depravity of Lee and Cheng, who are found to be locked within their own tragedies — Lee’s female body is afflicted, abused and ‘corrected’ by the oppressive logic of patriarchal order and decaying family while Cheng is worn by the powerlessness of life in the hopeless city where people cannot even afford a place to live. The uncanniness of Hong Kong urban gothic arising at the intersection of what can be familiar (the family and social order) and what remains eerily unknown (betrayals and failed expectation) has registered fear and dread in both females. This paper adds that it is in this space of paranoia, both females become increasingly schizophrenic that gratuitous violence is the last resort to end this suffering.
Nicola Wan is currently a PhD candidate at City University of Hong Kong. She graduated from University of Hong Kong with a Master degree in Literary and Culture Studies. Her research interests are Hong Kong literature and movies, Japanese literature, world literature and bilingual and literary theories.
Payel Dutta Chowdhury (REVA University, India)
‘My Thirst is Only for Khasi Blood’: Contextualizing the Legend of the Serpent Monster ‘U Thlen’ in the Khasi Oral Tradition from India’s Northeast
The snake is associated with various myths and beliefs among people all over the world and find place in several folklores. In many cultures, snakes symbolize healing, transformation and fertility. Snakes are also a part of many creation myths across the world. Many of the indigenous groups from India’s northeast region attach a lot of importance to the reptile in relation to their cultural identity. Verrier Elwin notes that the ‘tribal story-teller is primarily interested in three things about snakes: how they originally came into being, how they got their poison and became the enemies of men, and how some of them have succeeded in marrying human girls.’ (Myths, 1999, p. 319) Among the Khasis of Meghalaya, the legend of the snake deity, U Thlen, who demand human sacrifice from his worshippers, is well-known and one veiled in mystery even today. The issue is also sensitive and controversial as in recent years there have been incidents reported of killings in the name of ‘Nongshohnoh’ or keepers of the Thlen.
Drawing upon Cultural Studies and discourses on identity and material culture, this study will examine the various dimensions of the Khasi belief related to U Thlen and analyze the different legends to understand the meanings associated with its birth, death and re-birth. The study will also delve into the various beliefs and rituals associated with keeping the Thlen and its meaning and relevance in the contemporary Khasi society.
Dr Payel Dutta Chowdhury teaches literature at REVA University, Bangalore, India. She specializes in the study of folk culture and literature from India’s northeast region. Her published works include Lockdown Diaries: Stories of Unusual Times (2020); Folktales from India’s Northeast (2020); The Nagas: Social and Cultural Identity – Texts and Contexts (2019); The Women of Phoolbari and Other Stories (2019); and Dynamics of Self, Family and Community (2017).
Pimpawan Chaipanit (Prince of Songkla University, Thailand)
From Folk Horror to Urban Legend: A Case Study of Representation of Thai Ghostlore in Contemporary Thai Ghost Story by Pongwut Rujirachakorn
Pi and Pisat (ghosts and monsters) can be found in abundance in the Thai folklore and are the country’s popular cultural exports as seen in many recent horror series, movies, and games. These supernatural entities have altered their appearances and sites of haunting to suit the country’s modernisation, urbanisation, and economic and demographic changes. Thus, not only folk residue of Thai ghostlore may be found in the literary representations of ghosts and monsters in the contemporary Thai popular ghost stories, but also the social and cultural implications behind these spectral signs. One of the most prolific authors of contemporary Thai ghost stories is Pongwut Rujirachakorn. This paper proposes a textual analysis of Pongwut’s novels to uncover his narrative formula of successful Thai ghost stories. It will also examine specific Thai ghostlore and demonology adapted by Pongwut, such as Pi Ka and mediumship to analyse its social and cultural connotations that are symptomatic to the transformation of folklore into urban legend.
Pimpawan Chaipanit is an English language and literature lecturer at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand. Her research interests include global Anglophone literature, women’s fiction, and the Asian Gothic. She wrote the afterword for a Thai translation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Library House). Her latest article about the EcoGothic in Apichatpong’s film and Pitchaya’s novel was published in SARE journal by the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Universiti Malaya.
Pokkasina Chathiphot, Pannawadee Srikhao, Nilobol Phuraya, Yanika Saensuriwong (Sakon Nakhon Rajabhat University, Thailand)
Woven Textiles in the Ritual of Spirit Worship of the Tai Ethnic Group in the Mekong Basin
The objectives of this article were to 1) study the ritual of spirit worship of the Tai ethnic groups of Thailand and Laos, and 2) analyze the role of woven textiles in the ritual of spirit worship of the Tai ethnic groups living on the Mekong Basin in northeastern Thailand and Laos. In-depth interview data were collected from 50 key informants, who were a group of folk healers, shamans, and participants in the ritual of spirit worship, including a group of weavers and communities who continue to practice traditions or rituals of spirit worship in the community. Participant observations were also used to get first hand data and information. It was found that the ritual of spirit worship is still present and inherited in Tai communities in both Thailand and Laos. It is popularly practiced in the ritual of spirit worship in the third and fourth months of the Tai people’s lunar calendar. The woven textiles play an important role in the ritual ceremonies of spirit worship where woven textiles are used as an important component of the offering rite costume, demonstrating the hierarchy and position of the supernatural, a mediator between man and supernatural power, a foretelling and a symbol of fertility.
Pokkasina Chathiphot, Pannawadee Srikhao, Nilobol Phuraya, Yanika Saensuriwong are lecturers in the Department of Thai Language, Faculty of Humanities, Sakon Nakhon Rajabhat University, Thailand.
Pulkita Anand (Govt PG Shahid Chandrashekar College, India)
Vikram and Betal: A Gothic Folklore
Though folklores are regional they too have become a global phenomenon. Indian folklores are rich in imagination and graphic detail. There is variety and versatility in them. With the diverse culture of India, one can find diverse forms of folklores. Folklores traverse, teach and transform our existence. These cultural ensigns are adopted into popular media form and become a rich source of change in society. Stories of Vikram and Betal, originally known as Betal Panchavimshati (Sanskrit) is an ancient Indian story collection. It is a collection of twenty-five stories. Vikram is the king and Betal, is a demon. The very title of the tale has a gothic element in it. The paper explores how gothic elements are intertwined in this folklore. It attempts to look at how this folklore-inspired other stories. It examines its use in popular media form. It proffers to evaluate its educational significance.
Pulkita Anand is an Assistant Professor of English at Shahid Chandrasekhar Govt. PG College, Jhabua. Earlier she worked at Banasthali Vidyapith for six years, where she was actively engaged in organizing national workshops. Her areas of research are Indian writing in English and British drama. She has experience of teaching language, literature and communication skills and published twenty research papers. She is also a member of the editorial/advisory board of the journal New Academia. She has also published some poems, book reviews and short stories. Her research papers are also selected to be published in international anthologies.
Saeedeh Esmailzadeh, Maryam Soltan Beyad (University of Tehran, Iran)
Gothic Spaces, Fantastic Creatures and Individuals in One Thousand and One Nights
One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights, compiles a collection of wondrous middle-eastern folktales. The indelible impact of One Thousand and One Nights on western literature is indubitable. Several scholars have specifically looked into this narrative’s influence on western Romantic literature; nevertheless, it should be underscored that the stories of this folklore have also crept into Gothic literature. The infiltration of gothic literature by the fantastic elements of One Thousand and One Nights barely comes as a surprise since Gothic and romantic literature share inextricable roots. Additionally, this middle-eastern folklore is rife with fantastical and horrifying features that similarly characterize the western gothic genre. However, the studies that investigate the possible correlations between this prose and Gothic literature are far from exhaustive. The present study aims to fill the gap in the literature by examining three facets of One Thousand and One Nights thatlater resurface in western Gothic and horror literature, namely gothic spaces, creatures, and individuals. In One Thousand and One Nights, the torturous, unstable, and dynamic spaces fashion an atmosphere of horror and uncertainty; the fantastic creatures disrupt the conventional order of the terrestrial world; and the characters are victimized by uncontrollable earthly and supernatural forces. By providing detailed examples, this paper will substantiate that these elements from One Thousand and One later emerge in Gothic literature.
Saeedeh Esmailzadeh is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Tehran. Currently, she is writing her dissertation under the direction of Maryam Soltan Beyad. Her dissertation examines the intricate relationship between Enlightenment philosophy and the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Gothic novels.
Maryam Soltan Beyad is an associate professor of English language and literature at the University of Tehran. Her main areas of interest include Romantic and Gothic literature, Renaissance and Shakespeare Studies, and Victorian studies.
Samantha Landau (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Representations of Feminine Monstrosity and the Numinous in Japanese Folklore and 20th Century Fiction
Female phantasms of the living and the dead that appear in Japanese folklore involve a dual image of women: the representation of a patriarchal ideal of women, and the monstrous double that revolts against that ideal. Representations of this folklore-inspired ideal/monstrous woman can be seen in a wide-ranging array of 20th and 21st century Japanese fiction, from the early cannibalistic spirits in folklore-inspired tales by Izumi Kyoka to the mid-century Marxist works of Abe Kobo and possession narratives of Enchi Fumiko to the contemporary short fiction of Matsuda Aoko. This research will make clear how actual physical sites of haunting, such as the castle of Himeji, and classical Japanese texts act as a repository of a haunted history, and inspire 20th and 21st century fictional characters to both subvert and rebel against the patriarchal order. It will connect these physical localities to fiction, such as the possession narrative in Enchi Fumiko’s Onnamen (Masks, 1958) and mediumship in Namamiko Monogatari (A Tale of False Fortunes, 1965), making clear the ties between classical Japanese literature, folklore, and modern fiction. Building upon extant research from folklorists and cultural anthropologists such as Higashi Masao and Yanagita Kunio, and critical literary theories on the appearance of ghosts in Japanese fiction by Ikoma Natsumi, Henry Hughes, and others, this project proposes to examine the feminine ghostly presences as an expression of the subordination of women and their subversion of it—through the implementation of the supernatural.
Samantha Landau is a Project Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo (Komaba), where she teaches courses focusing on American and Comparative Literature and Culture. Her research primarily concerns women’s writing, supernatural and Gothic fiction, especially in the works of Shirley Jackson and Emily Dickinson. She also writes on the connections between poetry, culture, and music. She is currently working on a monograph on the Domestic Gothic. She is currently principal investigator on ‘Domestic Spaces in Gothic Literature,’ an extended 3-year JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C (KAKENHI) and ‘Ghosts and Outsiders in Gothic Fiction’ a 4-year JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early Career Scientists (KAKENHI).
Sarah Olive (University of Bangor, UK)
Education, Asian Folklore, and the Gothic
My colleagues on this project are interested in researching wide-ranging texts in the field of Asian Folklore, Folk Horror, and the Gothic. My interest is in how these texts are taught and learnt in higher education, and sometimes the final years of high schools, in – and beyond – Asia. My strand of this project deploys a survey with educators using the GAA website and participating in our events. The survey instrument will be adapted from, and is already validated by its use in, two previous research projects led by me. It aims to find out 1) How educators define Asian Folklore, Folk Horror, and Gothic texts; 2) What Asian Folklore, Folk Horror, and Gothic texts are taught to students: in which departments/programmes/subjects and at what levels?; and 3) How educators make choices about which Asian Folklore, Folk Horror, and Gothic texts they teach. What features do they seek to include, which do they wish to avoid, and why? Simple descriptive statistics and thematic analysis will be combined to analyze the results. This strand of the project combines an interest in, and methods from, literary studies and educational research to ensure that we understand, communicate, and maximize, the potential impacts of our research into these texts on stakeholders in educational institutions in, and beyond, Asia.
Dr Sarah Olive is a Senior Lecturer at Bangor University (UK). She is one of the founding members of the Gothic in Asia Association. She gained funding to co-found GAA from the GB Sasakawa Foundation in 2020. Sarah’s gothic interest centres on vampires in young adult (YA) literature, especially those texts appropriating Shakespeare. She shared her work on this as a plenary speaker at the Gothic Spaces conference in 2019. In 2018, she co-ran the Gothic in Japan conference with Dr Alex Watson (Meiji), resulting in the collaborative creation of an online resource on British Gothic monsters in East Asian culture that reflects and enriches her own teaching.
Sean McHugh (Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China)
Gothic Deception and Hindu Myth, The Wicker Man as Critique of Western Apollonian over Asian Dionysian Mind
The presentation proposes to examine the connection between Gothic deception and the reference to Hindu myth in the famous British film The Wicker Man of 1973. The Wicker Man discusses whether deception and exploitation can be justified by the inability of the deceived to make the required judgements of what takes place around them. The more direct mental processes of the intuition and common sense are placed over rationality, high principle and intellectual workings in the context of a May Day rite of a Scottish island pagan village and a Christian policeman from the mainland deceived into investigating a supposed missing girl. The film generates a debate over whether the islanders’ more aesthetic thought driven by deeper unstated impulses traced to the east or the policeman’s foregrounded rules and laws of the West are right.
Paganism and other aspects of the contemporary European non-Christian spiritual resurgance compare with Hinduism and Buddhism in their minimum of scriptual and priestly mediation between the devotee and divine. The film parallels the Hindu god Shiva in his Nataraja form or god of dance circumscribed by the fire of excessive rationality and sky castle thinking, along with the myths of Ganesh, Brahma and Chinnamasta who gain self-realization by losing overthinking heads, and imagery of the sun god Surya, all contrasted with the protagonist policeman acting out the passion story. Its Gothic themes include taunting by and returning to the past, ruined religious buildings, claustrophobia, subtle persecution, and murder.
The presentation seeks to reveal the connection between Indian mythologies and the Dionysian mind, as is manifested in the film. The islanders deceive the policeman while he thinks he’s deceiving them and as his rationalizing insanity peaks he puts on a fool’s costume and marches himself to destruction in a strident critique of Christianity as expressive of intellectualized Western culture. I show that deception is a matter for the deceived not the deceiver and that the islanders are entirely right in manoeuvring, killing and offering their victim to their sun god because he’s a fool or otherwise unable to see what’s before him. The dual employment of Gothic tropes and Indian myth in the film demonstrates a conceptual gap in Western Apollonian mind and its potential resolution.
Sean McHugh is from England. He has a philosophy bachelors, music masters and international studies diploma, has taught at four universities in China and South Korea and is currently at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. He’s written on applying concepts in Indian philosophy to a range of topics in the Western humanities including music, film, ethics and sexuality; he’s familiar with over 4000 hours of art music and visited over a hundred countries in making sense of culture.
Shengyu Wang (Soochow University, China)
‘Haunted Mountain Abbey’: The Oral and Textual Transmissions of a Zombie Story in Southern China, 1200-1800
This paper discusses the many versions of a prevalent Chinese zombie story, which I call ‘Haunted Mountain Abbey.’ First recorded by the twelfth-century historian Hong Mai, this horror story typically features a nocturnal visit by a reanimated corpse to a scholar, who is spending the night alone in a mountaintop Buddhist temple. In the ensuing six centuries, the same basic story was retold numerous times in various records of the strange (zhiguai ) and one vernacular short story ( huaben ), most of which should be regarded as mutual analogues.
Through a survey of these versions of the ‘Haunted Mountain Abbey’ narrative, this paper locates the story’s origin in the lower Yangtze region, where it circulated both orally and textually, among the elite as much as among the lower social strata. In addition to its transmission history, this paper also explores issues of body and identity in ‘Haunted Mountain Abbey,’ identifying the zombie in the narratives as a specific class of revenant (gui ) in Chinese culture. Using textual comparisons, this paper suggests that the more sophisticated versions of ‘Haunted Mountain Abbey’ intensify their horrifying effect through a vivid staging of the nocturnal visitor’s sudden shift of identity from the ghost of a friend to the corpse of a stranger.
Shengyu Wang holds a Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature and teaches in the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Soochow University. His peer-reviewed works have appeared or are forthcoming in international journals such as Comparative Literature, Renditions, Folklore, and T’oung Pao. He is the 2022 winner of Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Award for his journal article on Herbert Giles’ 1880 translation of Pu Songling’s 17th-century collection of tales of the strange.
Soumyarup Bhattacharjee (IIT Bombay, India)
Gothic Allegory and Postcolonial Malaysia in Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury
Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury (1992)follows the stories of three generations of women belonging to the same family, whose experiences are centred on the colonial convent at the hill. The novel presents a series of intra-generational as well as intergenerational narrative fragments that are woven together through indigenous folklore, fragments of oral history, tales of spectral haunting, and scenes from everyday life. The novel consciously reanimates the traces of the past— images, metaphors, and symbols that have been used to define and describe Malaya as an ontological other in Orientalist writings— and, at the same time, questions the discourses that underpin them.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how the project of colonialism and its political and cultural legacies themselves unfold as gothic allegories and, conversely, how the gothic offers a way of literary meaning-making beyond the limitations of realist fiction in narrating the postcolonial condition in Malaysia through a close reading of the novel. I put forward an interpretative framework that is based on three inter-connected elements: firstly, examining the conventions of the gothic that are adapted and employed in the text and the purpose they serve within the textual space; secondly, exploring how these gothic elements are interwoven with traditional folklore, myths, symbols, and superstitions, and thirdly, interpreting the allegorical structure of the novel, constituted by the gothic’s interplay with specific symbols and motifs such as the pontianak and the crocodile, vis-à-vis the cultural context of the novel and the historical moment of its inception.
Soumyarup Bhattacharjee is presently a doctoral research scholar and teaching assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. His current research is centred on transcultural and transmedial approaches to contemporary gothic literature in South and Southeast Asia. Previously he has worked as a ‘Guest Lecturer’ at the Department of English, Aliah University, Kolkata. His other areas of interest include adaptation studies, postcolonial Indian writing, and contemporary horror literature/films.
Süleyman Bölükbaş
Theorizing Turkish Islamic Gothic: Religion, Rituals and Asia Minor
Located in Asia Minor/Anatolia, Turkey has an ambivalent definition regarding its borderlands with its Central Asian roots and politically ‘Western’ position. The Middle-Eastern and Asian influences present themselves in Turkish Gothic, stemming from Asia Minor’s blurred location. This project seeks to theorize Turkish Islamic Gothic by analyzing Islamic and Asian religious practices such as sama and shamanism as historical/cultural continuums. Focusing on The Aleph (2020), streamed online, the research explores how Middle-Eastern and Asian influences shape Turkish Islamic Gothic in Asia Minor. Consequently, this research discusses Turkey’s place in Asia while tracing Gothic’s global circulation through local cultures.
Süleyman Bölükbaş is a PhD student in Comparative Literature. Originally from Turkey, his research focuses on comparative analysis of Turkish literature, gender and sexuality studies in literature and culture, and queer and gothic studies. He is interested in queer readings of the gothic as an international and global phenomenon. His research particularly revolves around the global circulation of gothic narratives in relation to local identities, cultures, nations and how gothic’s queerness is reshaped by them.
Suriyaporn Eamvijit (Thammasat University, Thailand)
Ong (องค์) as Idols: Redefining Guardian Spirits among Young Spiritual Practitioners in Thailand
Fortune telling and spiritual practices have recently become popular among youths in Thailand, as evidenced by the increase of online and offline spiritual communities. Although many young believers still follow Thai folklores about guardian spirits Ong (องค์) that can grant the hosts spiritual power and protect them from evil spirits, they have adapted the concept of Ong in a new and creative way. This paper examines the hybridization and politicization of Ong among Thai youths through close reading analysis of posts on social media such as Facebook or Twitter, as well as through in-depth interviews of twenty practitioners in Thailand. Drawing upon Homi K. Bhabha’s hybridity, this paper argues that new generations of believers reject the concept of a rigid nation-state and therefore embrace spirits from various cultures. Moreover, their democratic sentiments changed the way they interact with supernatural entities. Younger worshippers tend to humanize the spirits and regard them as mentors instead of transcendental untouchable beings. Some even consider the spirits as idols, both in traditional and contemporary senses, resulting in a growing trend of treating faith in different divinities as fandoms. Consequently, the attempts to go beyond cultural borders of faith and humanize holy beings render spiritual sites into what is termed by Bhabha as the ‘third space’ in which folklores from different cultures are hybridized and intertwined with the secular world where Thai youths, amidst a political turmoil, are struggling to gain autonomy and challenge the established hierarchy, be it from institutional or supernatural power.
Suriyaporn Eamvijit is a lecturer of Literary Studies at the Faculty of Liberal Arts. Her research interests include literary studies, cultural studies, politics of design, and the intersection of architecture and literature. Her current research is the development and dynamics of punk fashion among Thai youths from 2000s to 2020s.
Sydney Van To (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Possession as Critique: Southeast Asian Folk Horror
Sigmund Freud left out a third term when theorizing mourning and melancholia as the two reactions to the experience of loss. This missing third term, possession, is revealing of a Western-centrism within psychoanalysis which fails to account for this widespread form of grieving across the Global South. This paper argues that the idiom of possession allows us to bring together various films under a regional category of Southeast Asian folk horror, and further reveals the political grief which is expressed through these films. Southeast Asian folk horror is emblematic of what we might term ‘possessed modernity,’ whereby the modern subject’s experience of being a possession of the capitalist and patriarchal structure, while being dispossessed of one’s relationship to land and cultural traditions, is expressed through the trope of spiritual possession which brings together conversations of the postsecular with the postcolonial. This paper will test this thesis against a wave of recent folk horror emerging from Southeast Asia: Joko Anwar’s Impetigore (Indonesia, 2019), Banjon Pisanthanakun’s The Medium (Thailand / Korea, 2021), Emir Ezwan’s Roh (Malaysia, 2019), and Matty Do’s Dearest Sister (Laos, 2016).
There is a widely shared sense that Southeast Asian horror has always been folk horror, but this paper also seeks to demonstrate the influence of the Western folk horror revival since 2010, particularly as theorized by Dawn Keetley and Adam Scovell. Furthermore, this paper asks: What is entailed in this movement from an anthropological account toward an aesthetic account of possession, which does not see these films as attempting to naively reflect the spiritual beliefs or cultural psyches of Southeast Asians, but rather, as engaging with folklore as a malleable cultural reservoir which bears upon the capabilities of cinema?
Sydney Van To is a PhD student at UC Berkeley with research interests in Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, and genre. He is the deputy editor of diaCRITICS, a journal of Southeast Asian diaspora politics and culture, and the project manager of Ink & Blood, which publishes Vietnamese diaspora literature in translation. His writing is featured or forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Amerasia Journal, Clues: A Journal of Detection, and Canadian Literature.