The School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University Singapore welcomes Prof. Rosalind Galt (KCL) for the first Virtual Research Seminar of 2023.
The pontianak, or female vampire, is one of the most popular supernatural creatures in Malay cinema and indeed in Singaporean culture more broadly. The pontianak film first flourishes in the Singapore studio system from 1957-65, animating precolonial beliefs exactly at the time when Malaysia and Singapore were forming as postcolonial nations. This emergence of animism as genre illuminates the importance of cinema in the imaginative processes of decolonization. As a vengeful female spirit, the pontianak has obvious feminist potential, but she troubles other orthodoxies too. In cinema, her manifestations are queer, spectral, non-human. She registers a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity; globalization and indigeneity; racial and national identities; and the relationship of Islam to animism. This talk will analyse the pontianak from classical 1950s horror to contemporary film and television, and will consider its manifestations as a way of thinking ‘world cinema’.
WHEN: January 20 2023 at 4:00PM Singapore time (8:00AM GMT)
WHERE: on Zoom
HOW TO BOOK (or contact Cheryl Julia Lee cheryl.lee@ntu.edu.sg)