Monster-producing Islands: Prospects for island detourning in contemporary times

Abstract

Colonialism produces monsters thriving in island ecologies, but without a structural/historical treatment of how island monsters are created, how the agential relation between colonisers and natives accentuates the dynamics of interpellation, the island would reveal nothing of its past, the reusable trace that can be interpellated in the present. In the modern-day Philippines, a former colonial object to three foreign aggressions (Spanish, American and Japanese) that spanned almost half a millennium, such reusable trace has recently entered the international streaming platform Netflix. Trese (2021), a Philippine-made anime, navigates the myth of aswang, one of the dominant features of Filipino folklore, which centres on the image of a female, vampire-like monster. This image traces its iterative root in the lost history of the babaylans (female shamans) amid the creation of folk Christianity and diffracted engagements with the Christian indoctrination of the islands. This article navigates this subject and how Trese, among other actants in this play of figuration, is itself interpellated by traces of historical, geographical, and non-human ecologies that, in turn, reflect the fundamental role of liquidity in monster-creation as a material-semiotic intervention. As the discussions expand on the two most essential concepts in Island Studies today, the archipelagic and the aquapelagic, the article deploys the concept of detourning, a critical rhetorical arc that binds the article’s multi-faceted discussions, connections, and combinations, from human to the non-human, thus completing its assessment of the dynamics of islands being interpellated by traces.