Nazry Bahrawi is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian literature and culture at the University of Washington-Seattle. His research examines intersections between animal fables and racial discourses in Malay-Indonesian literary texts and films. He has published on racialism, modernism, literary Islam and translation as cultural rewriting in maritime Southeast Asia in relation to other Indian Ocean cultures and global Anglophone Muslim texts and films. Dr. Nazry is an editor-at-large at Wasafiri magazine. He is a member of the editorial team at the Journal of Practice, Research and Tangential Activities (PR&TA) and Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature.
Abstract: “Nusantara Gothic: Malay-Indonesian folk horror cinema as speculative fiction“
Can Southeast Asian ghost stories account as speculative fiction? Yes, if we agree with the logic of Singaporean poet-writer Ng Yi-Sheng who sees the 1950s ghost stories written by former politician Othman Wok as pioneering Singapore’s brand of speculative fiction (qtd. in Ho par. 6). This presentation will argue for greater nuance on Ng’s observation. Arguing against the universalizing tendency to make horror synonymous to speculative fiction (spec-fic), it argues that at least one distinct genre—Malay-Indonesian folk horror cinema—can account as speculative fiction. It will demonstrate such by analyzing two 2019 films, Roh by Malaysian director Emir Ezwan and Impetigore by Indonesian director Joko Anwar, in light of Sherryl Vint’s observation that spec-fic “encourages examination of the irrational and affective dimensions of experience as well as logical extrapolation” from our current state of affairs and “rethinks the discourses by which we understand commonplace reality” (90). While film scholar Thomas Barker had described the two films as part of a new wave of low budget folk horror films from the Malay Archipelago to refresh the tired tropes of Western horror (qtd. in Ferrarese par.10), I counter-argue that the two is better seen as part of a local tradition of Malay filmmaking that I opt to call Nusantara Gothic to speculate alternative social realities, a cinematic tradition traceable to earlier films like the 1958 Sumpah Orang Minyak (Curse of the Oily Man), a social critique about the intersections between toxic masculinity and resource extraction in the Malay Archipelago.