A collection of scholarly articles on the manifestation of the Gothic in South Asian cultures.
South Asian Gothic is the first attempt to theorize South Asia and its gothic production as a cultural landscape in its own right. The volume consists of fifteen scholarly articles that describe the many ways that the Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. The Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic and narrative practice, as well as a process of signification where conventional gothic tropes and imagery are reappropriated, resisted, and transformed. The volume investigates the South Asian Gothic both as a local variety of international gothic, as well as a part of the transnational category of “globalgothic,” contributing to the ongoing discussion about the need to de-westernize gothic methodologies.
South Asian Gothic is the first attempt to theorize South Asia and its gothic production as a cultural landscape in its own right. The volume consists of fifteen scholarly articles that describe the many ways that the Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. The Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic and narrative practice, as well as a process of signification where conventional gothic tropes and imagery are reappropriated, resisted, and transformed. The volume investigates the South Asian Gothic both as a local variety of international gothic, as well as a part of the transnational category of “globalgothic,” contributing to the ongoing discussion about the need to de-westernize gothic methodologies.
288 pages | 7 halftones | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2021
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Katarzyna Ancuta and Deimantas Valanciunas. Introduction
I. History, Politics, and Trauma
1. Amit R. Baishya. Places Stained by Time: The Gothic Poetics of State Terror in Dhrubajyoti Bora’s Kalantor Trilogy
2. Kamayani Sharma. Home Is Where the Horror Is: Pakistani Films and Historical Trauma
3. Nishi Pulugurtha. The Past and the Present: A Reading of Bhooter Bhabishyat
II. Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Gothic
4. Prasanta Bhattacharyya. Search and Subterfuge: The Haunting of the Bengali Bhadralok in Tagore’s ‘The Hungry Stones’
5. Shweta Sachdeva Jha. Tracing Terror and the Uncanny in the Gothic Urdu Fiction of Hijab Imtiaz Ali
6. Deimantas Valanciunas. Rebecca in India: The Appropriation of European Gothic in Bombay Cinema
7. Shilpa Daithota Bhat. ‘Khamosh! … The Kaptan is going to speak’: Gothic Conventions and Diaspora in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
III. Spirits, Rituals, and Folklore
8. Runa Chakraborty. Mysteries in the Air: Modern Bhutan and the Cultural Representations of the Supernatural
9. Davide Torri. No Place for Trespassers. Notes Toward a Himalayan Anthropology of Fright
10. Sarah Joshi. Monsters of Every Stripe: Navigating the Werebeasts of Indian Horror Cinema
11. Ira Sarma. The Tantric as Gothic Villain: Kapalikas and Aghoris in Medieval and Contemporary Indian Literature
IV. Gothic Media
12. Aditi Sen. The Making of a Monster: Evil in Hindi Comics.
13. Valentina Vitali. ‘But Are They All Horrid?’ On the Intermittent Use of the Gothic in Hindi Horror Cinema
14. Katarzyna Ancuta. Detecting Ghosts: Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit as Global Gothic Television
15. Muhammed Shahriar Haque. ‘Bhoot FM’ and the Gothic Tradition in Bangladesh
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Katarzyna Ancuta and Deimantas Valanciunas. Introduction
I. History, Politics, and Trauma
1. Amit R. Baishya. Places Stained by Time: The Gothic Poetics of State Terror in Dhrubajyoti Bora’s Kalantor Trilogy
2. Kamayani Sharma. Home Is Where the Horror Is: Pakistani Films and Historical Trauma
3. Nishi Pulugurtha. The Past and the Present: A Reading of Bhooter Bhabishyat
II. Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Gothic
4. Prasanta Bhattacharyya. Search and Subterfuge: The Haunting of the Bengali Bhadralok in Tagore’s ‘The Hungry Stones’
5. Shweta Sachdeva Jha. Tracing Terror and the Uncanny in the Gothic Urdu Fiction of Hijab Imtiaz Ali
6. Deimantas Valanciunas. Rebecca in India: The Appropriation of European Gothic in Bombay Cinema
7. Shilpa Daithota Bhat. ‘Khamosh! … The Kaptan is going to speak’: Gothic Conventions and Diaspora in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
III. Spirits, Rituals, and Folklore
8. Runa Chakraborty. Mysteries in the Air: Modern Bhutan and the Cultural Representations of the Supernatural
9. Davide Torri. No Place for Trespassers. Notes Toward a Himalayan Anthropology of Fright
10. Sarah Joshi. Monsters of Every Stripe: Navigating the Werebeasts of Indian Horror Cinema
11. Ira Sarma. The Tantric as Gothic Villain: Kapalikas and Aghoris in Medieval and Contemporary Indian Literature
IV. Gothic Media
12. Aditi Sen. The Making of a Monster: Evil in Hindi Comics.
13. Valentina Vitali. ‘But Are They All Horrid?’ On the Intermittent Use of the Gothic in Hindi Horror Cinema
14. Katarzyna Ancuta. Detecting Ghosts: Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit as Global Gothic Television
15. Muhammed Shahriar Haque. ‘Bhoot FM’ and the Gothic Tradition in Bangladesh