Abstract
Nick Joaquin, Catherine Lim, and Yangsze Choo’s stories often pertain to the colonization of the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia, respectively. These nations fall under the region of Southeast Asia, where scary stories are not only popular but are based on local folktales, and the presence of supernatural encounters or entities in these legends teaches the consequences of what happens when one subverts societal values. These superstitions mirror several tropes belonging to the Gothic mode; when one combines these indigenous tropes, in particular the significance of the body, with the historical context of Southeast Asia, the “postcolonial Gothic” is born. Key examples of the “postcolonial Gothic” include Joaquin’s short stories “May Day Eve” and “The Mass of St. Sylvestre”, which discuss his insistence that his nation must reflect on their colonial past to improve their future circumstances, Lim’s short stories “The Exhumation” and “Of Blood From Woman”, which detail her critiques on the government’s prioritization of modernization over respecting precolonial traditions, and Choo’s novel The Night Tiger, which references the injustices present in colonial Malaya from a postcolonial perspective. However, the validity of the “postcolonial Gothic” is a contentious topic as scholars debate on whether its inclusion of Western perspectives when analyzing the literature of a non-Western region is problematic. Ultimately, the reader discovers that these three authors utilize this scary story trope, as well as the body as a symbol of their countries’ national identities, to teach the reader the ramifications of colonialism on their nations’ identities, as represented by the power of the human body.