New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. xii, 290 pp. (B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780231201339.
Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters is an exciting piece of scholarship on some long-neglected areas within Southeast Asian studies. First, it offers one of the very few serious and in-depth scholarly considerations of Southeast Asian horror, here by way of a broader study of the locally well-known figure of the “pontianak,” a distinctive female ghost who appears in various interrelated forms (and within multiple popular media) across Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. This study in turn provides the opportunity for an account of the uniquely and complexly multi- and often trans-cultural and trans-national mode of film production that existed in the Cathay Keris and Shaw Brothers film studios at the time of the initial wave of pontianak films from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. However, Galt’s more central interest and purpose here is to make a theoretical and methodological intervention of sorts: to use the study of the pontianak to make a case for the importance of postcolonial understandings and analyses of Southeast Asian popular culture, as well as to model what such an analysis might entail. (In doing so, Galt takes up a call notably recently articulated by Gerald Sim in his monograph Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability, Amsterdam University Press, 2020.)
The introductory chapter lays out these aims quite explicitly, introducing the figure of the pontianak and her importance to Singaporean and Malaysian cultural history, but going further to emphasize that the pontianak’s importance for the book is in the way its cultural and historical specificities (and in particular its connection to an animist world view) may precipitate a rethinking of approaches not only to regional cinema or the horror film, but world cinema more broadly. The figure of the pontianak, for Galt, calls forth disruptions of received and dominant conceptualizations of gender, race, religion, and power, and in relation to this the pontianak works to produce a “decolonizing imaginary” with implications for rethinking “Malay histories, subjectivities, and epistemologies” (34). Chapter 1 digs down into more specific details of the industrial history of the pontianak film, highlighting the distinctively transnational and multi-racial conditions of their production and their particular purchase for Malay culture—and convincingly developing an account of the latter by way of such primary sources as contemporary local press coverage, advertisements, and other archival materials. The chapter stresses in particular that, while the pontianak is understood as a distinctively Malay figure, “she does not fit neatly with the conservative visions of Malay ethnonationalism” (71)—among other reasons because she is an affront to patriarchal authority, because her presence always bespeaks effaced historical/colonial inequities, and because her own character and relation to the community is complexly and ambivalently figured (as at once an enforcer of justice for community members and a source of horror and fear).
Chapters 2 and 3 turn the focus more specifically to the pontianak’s intersection with discourses/categories/hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and nation. Galt’s position is that while certainly some of the pontianak texts exhibit outwardly misogynistic themes and representations, the figure of the pontianak more broadly “unseats the epistemologies of patriarchy, and does so in ways that create feminist and queer ways of seeing” (81). After surveying some of the ambivalent dynamics of gender, sexuality, and power in the pontianak’s popular genre films, Galt moves on to postulate more affirmatively that the figure of the pontianak points towards a recasting of such power relations through what she terms a “pontianak feminism,” which requires reading the figure “in relation to issues that are central to Southeast Asian postcolonial histories: modernity and precolonial worldviews, religion and secularism, race and identity, heritage and inheritance, and development and the environment” (95). Galt then goes on to parallel the pontianak’s gender disruptiveness with a consonant unsettling of racial categorizations, through demonstrations of the ways that the figure’s narratives consistently align her with racial/religious/national outsiders.
The book’s final two chapters, 4 and 5, are perhaps the most engaging and compelling in suggesting novel ways of pursuing a postcolonial analysis of popular texts by focusing on the status of the spaces of these texts—specifically the kampong (traditional Malay village) and the forest—as well as the range of their inhabitants, both human and non-human. The adoption of an animist perspective (alluded to above) decentres the agency of the putatively dominant (male Muslim Malay) subject and gives rise to an understanding of the spaces that the pontianak inhabits as both shaped by and evocative of a highly fraught colonial heritage.
Alluring Monsters is an engagingly written and impressively well-researched piece of scholarship. Galt goes to pains to make sure to find critical sources by writers from the region, as well as pontianak examples from popular media that have been little known and/or difficult to access (such as past pontianak-themed television productions). This said, there were also a couple of minor areas where the analysis could have been sharpened. For example, the specific physical embodiments of the pontianak in the extant cinematic texts, and the unusual nature of some of the pontianak transformations (which one would think obvious fodder for readings along the lines she discusses) receive surprisingly scant attention. Another area which gets briefly discussed but could perhaps have used further exploration is the pontianak’s connection to the broader stable of figures of horror across the region, where there are indeed many suggestive parallels to be found (though perhaps this would be better served in an Alluring Monsters “sequel”).
But these are relatively minor quibbles that do not undermine the major arguments or achievements to be found in what is an important, suggestive, and useful book—one that may well become a significant reference point both for scholars of Southeast Asian culture (and Singapore-Malaysia cultural politics in particular) and for researchers with serious interests in Asian horror traditions.
Adam Knee
Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore