Abstract. Malaysian horror films describe the pontianak as a supernatural entity with overflowing hair, vampire-like traits and a beautiful woman capable of seducing, charming and alluring her male victims. Once she has her target trapped, she transforms back into an unsightly pontianak and exacts her vengeance. Her capability of resurrecting from the afterlife and using her sexuality in seeking for death and destruction to those who have wronged her could position her as a villain or antagonist due to the chaos, destruction and murder to those regardless of innocence. Short of being labelled as a vamp or femme fatale, the pontianak continues being stereotyped as oppressive and monstrous for she gains supernatural strength and destablises a film's equilibrium. In short, the pontianak is seen as a threat towards partriachal order and such forms of representations are similarly shared in horror films globally. Using the films Sumpah Pontianak (1958) and Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004), this paper examines the representation, identity and roles of the Malaysian cinematic pontianak within the contexts of local and global horror cinemas.

Early Malaysian national cinema disseminates a social reconstruction process aimed at reconstructing Malay supremacy at the centre of a specific geographical, political, economic and cultural space. Aptly termed as 'Malaynisation', this process occurred during the Golden Age of Malaysian cinema through the films of P. Ramlee. While existing as a capitalist film culture located within an ethnically diverse society, early Malaysian cinema through Ramlee have produced a significant number of monoethnic representations solely focused on the culture, language and lifestyles of the Malays. As such, the articulation of the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Ramlee's films articulates a right-wing nationalist sentiment that upholds the sovereignty of the dominant Malays while undermining other ethnic communities. The nature of these representations enunciates the context of an 'imagined community' which locates the formation of a particular type of nationalism within a social, political and cultural communicative space. This paper examines the construction of the 'modern Malay' identity in Ramlee's films and the nationalist discourse in Ramlee's films as an attempt at producing the idea of a nation as a continuous narrative of national progression by presenting the postcolonial Malays as a modern, successful and dominant force.

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This essay discusses the employment of selected art forms and their effectiveness in portraying trauma and reconciliation in Tan Twan Eng’s novel, The Garden of Evening Mists ,(2012), employing the concepts of trauma by Caruth (1996), focusing on the inadequacy of language to articulate trauma. The trauma model features most prominently by Caruth argues that traumatic events are never known directly. Any knowledge of these past events is only a form of reproduction of the original. Therefore, trauma is a ‘paradoxical experience;’ what is most traumatic is that which does not appear in conscious memory— this inability to know challenges the reliability of language to represent the full extent of trauma. However, Tan’s novel shows that the problem of representing trauma can be countered in forms of art that function as a medium to convey and release silenced trauma. While trauma escapes language, personal memories become collective memories when commemorated in art forms. Letting go of the past is achieved by bringing it to the present in art forms. Tan’s work significantly adds to the analysis of trauma in literary works. By employing the dominant tropes of Japanese art forms in the novel, Tan employs strategies that demonstrate that literature and art can narrate silenced experiences and traumatic historical events and escapes articulation.