Awards

• Long-listed for Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation 2022

Overview

"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."

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Reviews

Alluring Monsters delivers on all of its ambitious promises. Rosalind Galt elegantly balances the local and the global, the historical and the theoretical, the industrial and the aesthetic, the cultural and the political, the filmic and the related arts. The result is an important new model for imagining world cinema. -- Adam Lowenstein, author of <i>Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media</i>

Alluring Monsters is indispensable reading for those interested in how media, folklore, and anticolonial feminism might be explored together. The pontianak, a female ghost of childbirth with queer feminist appeal, is a fascinating fusion of pre-Islamic animism and postindependence aspirations; her influence on transnational vampire lore is decisive but little known. Galt's deep dive into the political potential of the pontianak moves from colonial misconstruals of indigenous culture to late-colonial studio films and the decolonizing impulses of Malaysian and Singaporean popular cinemas. Across such multiethnic, intercultural flows, Galt explores issues of racialization, ethnonationalism, and environmentalism via an archivally rich exploration of supernatural horror in Southeast Asian and world cinemas. -- Bliss Cua Lim, author of <i>Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique</i> The first of its kind and a book like no other, Alluring Monsters brings Southeast Asian cinema and postcoloniality into productive tension through the much-beloved yet much-feared figure of the pontianak. Rosalind Galt has created thrilling new paths for thinking about postcolonial cinema, animism, feminism, queer/trans subjectivities, and decolonial politics. -- Alicia Izharuddin, author of <i>Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema</i> Alluring Monsters delivers on all of its ambitious promises. Rosalind Galt elegantly balances the local and the global, the historical and the theoretical, the industrial and the aesthetic, the cultural and the political, the filmic and the related arts. The result is an important new model for imagining world cinema. -- Adam Lowenstein, author of <i>Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media</i> Alluring Monsters is an excellent study of the role of the ubiquitous pontianak in the Malay cinema located in Malaysia and Singapore during the cultural processes of the decolonization of both countries. Galt's scholarship is impressive in its breadth and depth, contributing to our understanding of why we must take the monstrous figure of the pontianak seriously. -- Stephen Teo, author of <i>Chinese Martial Arts Film and the Philosophy of Action</i>

Alluring Monsters is indispensable reading for those interested in how media, folklore, and anticolonial feminism might be explored together. The pontianak, a female ghost of childbirth with queer feminist appeal, is a fascinating fusion of pre-Islamic animism and postindependence aspirations; her influence on transnational vampire lore is decisive but little known. Galt's deep dive into the political potential of the pontianak moves from colonial misconstruals of indigenous culture to late-colonial studio films and the decolonizing impulses of Malaysian and Singaporean popular cinemas. Across such multiethnic, intercultural flows, Galt explores issues of racialization, ethnonationalism, and environmentalism via an archivally rich exploration of supernatural horror in Southeast Asian and world cinemas. -- Bliss Cua Lim, author of <i>Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique</i> The first of its kind and a book like no other, Alluring Monsters brings Southeast Asian cinema and postcoloniality into productive tension through the much-beloved yet much-feared figure of the pontianak. Rosalind Galt has created thrilling new paths for thinking about postcolonial cinema, animism, feminism, queer/trans subjectivities, and decolonial politics. -- Alicia Izharuddin, author of <i>Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema</i> Alluring Monsters delivers on all of its ambitious promises. Rosalind Galt elegantly balances the local and the global, the historical and the theoretical, the industrial and the aesthetic, the cultural and the political, the filmic and the related arts. The result is an important new model for imagining world cinema. -- Adam Lowenstein, author of <i>Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media</i> Alluring Monsters is an excellent study of the role of the ubiquitous pontianak in the Malay cinema located in Malaysia and Singapore during the cultural processes of the decolonization of both countries. Galt's scholarship is impressive in its breadth and depth, contributing to our understanding of why we must take the monstrous figure of the pontianak seriously. -- Stephen Teo, author of <i>Chinese Martial Arts Film and the Philosophy of Action</i> Galt offers a rich and vivid history of the pontianak's relevance to questions of race, gender, and Islam in the context of decolonization in the Malay peninsula. This book's entwinement of local historiography with theorizations of the global comprises its bold and welcome intervention. * Film Quarterly *

Author Information

Rosalind Galt is professor of film studies at King’s College London. Her previous Columbia University Press books are The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (2006) and Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2011), and she is coauthor of Queer Cinema in the World (2016).

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