...the transgressive politics...

“…the transgressive politics of popular fiction…”

It’s actually well-documented if people actually bother to read up on it, and really, you only have to have eyes to see it. Two brief examples, as this is one topic I want to pursue in other more comprehensive posts: (1) Beverly Siy - she of quite a few Filipino-language ghost-horror anthologies – and her MA classmates once did a study about haunted houses in a nearby rural area, Bulacan or Batangas, I forget which, for a class in UP and their research unearthed the distinct notion of the haunted house phenomenon as a manifestation of class struggle, what with all the haunted houses we know of always being these big mansions isolated from the town proper by sheer walls and it’s always the townspeople around the mansion creating the various ghost narratives about the house. Two of the key questions in the paper was “Bakit lagi na lang haunted house? Bakit walang haunted kubo?” One of the PSICOM horror anthos was based on this research. I think it was Haunted Philippines. (2) The zombie narrative cycle in pop culture as reflection of society’s anxieties: it started out as a by-product of White America’s anxieties over African/Haitian culture, ie voodoo, informing the Mainland’s primarily Christian society, mashed-up with Richard Matheson’s postBlitzkrieg novel I Am Legend, reportedly the first scifi-horror novel, which I contest by saying maybe it should be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, evolving into George Romero’s initial reflection of antiCommunist America (The Night Of The Living Dead), to the onset of Consumerist America (Dawn Of The Dead), the paranoia of the Reagan years of Iran Contra (Day Of The Dead), to the reaction to 9/11 and the subsequent military mobilization (Land Of The Dead), and New Subjectivism in media studies (Diary Of The Dead), and now there’s Max Brooks’ novel World War Z, which is primarily a response to the American global antiTerrorism campaign, New Subjectivism, and the current meme of China as a sleeping dragon. And that’s just me talking about various texts’ inherent politics. The potentials of writing popular fiction as an actual act of transgression is, haha, well, that’s for a whole other post. But my point is, is that all of these things are layered and complex. George Romero is very vocal about his movies being more than movies. They are never merely for entertainment. They are also for social awareness.

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