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What’s tropical about Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic? Heat and corporeality in “The Summer Solstice” and “The Dying Wanton”
Citation
Ang, A. (2023). What’s tropical about Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic? Heat and corporeality in “The Summer Solstice” and “The Dying Wanton”. Kritika Kultura, 41. https://ajol.ateneo.edu/kk/articles/577/7206
Abstract
Since their first publication in magazines like Graphic and the Philippine Free Press, and their subsequent re-publication under the collection title “Tropical Gothic,” Nick Joaquin’s classic short stories from the 1940s have been appraised mainly within a gothic framework. While critics have read the doublings and monstrous excesses of these stories as expressing a postcolonial resistance to colonial modernity, or a desirous anxiety for a pre-colonial Philippines, this paper discusses tropicality as a further localisation of such gothic elements. By adopting a new materialist approach to ecological imaginaries, this article argues that the discourse of the tropical in Joaquin’s aesthetics exercises an agentic role in re-locating temperate climactic markers within the Philippines. After briefly tracing the broader intellectual history of the tropical and the gothic, the discussion turns to the tropical gothic as a distinct category for the refiguration of gothic tropes within a material and tropical aesthetics. By drawing on feminism materialisms, this article makes a case for understanding tropical heat in “The Summer Solstice” and “The Dying Wanton,” as a source of animation and motility. Further attention to transcorporeality in these stories reveals the transformative power of the tropical on human bodies in their more-than-human aspects. By departing from sociohistorical frameworks, this paper invites further consideration of Joaquin’s contribution to a Philippine materialist and environmental poetics.
Date Issued
2023
Publisher
Ateneo de Manila University
Journal
Kritika Kultura