Liminality—as both a theoretical concept and academic gaze—has seen a flurry of interest in the past decade. Most of the attention has been disciplinary in scope: liminality in literature, liminality in art, etc. Global Perspectives on the Liminality of the Supernatural is an edited volume with a rich array of perspectives on—among other things—science fiction, popular culture, fantasy, gender, and death. The editors’ companion book, Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death (also Lexington Books, published in 2021), leans closely on literary and media sources as well. While each one may be read alone, the two texts make an interesting pair. The editors developed Global Perspectives in 2020, noting in the acknowledgments that “Things were bleak, and people were fearful, angry, fed up, or feeling powerless. Sometimes all at once.” Knowing that about the writers and editors—and that this work reflects the spectre of COVID as well—clarifies the perspectives that guide the book. This orientation also gives the pages an unexpected but welcome urgency that refreshes continually with each new chapter and its new perspectives.
Global Perspectives divides into both parts and chapters, with one chapter per part except for a single part on Afrofuturism, with two chapters. Such perplexing division clutters the work unnecessarily, with a part title page—with one title—followed immediately by the part’s sole chapter with its own (different) title. Nonetheless, chapters 1 through 5 are labeled as parts perhaps because of their emphasis on area. In chapter 1, Liz W. Faber joins 1927’s film Metropolis (Austria) with 2012’s Doomsday Book (South Korea), positing the latter as an effective critique of the former. It includes detailed summaries of each, and turns one of the standard analyses of both—as deeply dystopian—on its head by suggesting that in the midst of capitalist chaos and robotic industrialization, something as simple as a handshake can save the future. Chapter 2 has as its focus a fifty-episode Chinese television series, developed after multiple genre-crossing adaptations of an original serialized book, titled The Untamed (Cheng Qing Ling). Authors Qin and Cheong explore how classic issues of duty, desire, revenge, death, and loyalty occur when puppets (zombies) are used to control humans. Drawing from Taiwanese folklore, history, and mythology to inform their analysis, the authors note the risky nature of including queer or queer-implying characters in a popular television series, risking government censorship. It is the ways in which the series holds the center of that censorship line that makes this chapter so interesting.
Chapter 3’s discussion of post-Soviet Union film and the exploration of such dangerous themes as gender, violence, individuality, and nationhood highlights two 1990s films by director Sergei Livnev: Kiks and Hammer and Sickle. Rather like the only partly dystopian sense of the two films in chapter 1, Lev Nikulin’s analysis here pulls aside the veil of tragedy to examine the potential for hope and moving beyond the relentless policing and martyring of gendered bodies. A particularly vivid window into Australian authors’ exploration of Aboriginal vampire mythology by McKenzie Tozan in chapter 4 represents a fascinating shift away from the “sparkly” vampire fictions of the 1990s and 2000s, and comes closer to older, darker models that themselves connect with Slavic lore. The fact that figures of Indigenous horror make their way into quotidian conversation and urban legend alike contributes to their eerie effectiveness as elements of Australian horror fiction. The Caribbean in chapter 5 completes the area focus of the first major portion of the book; co-editor James VanderVeen examines the nature of Taíno belief and the ways in which it differs from Western duality. The Taíno know themselves to be deeply connected to both the natural and supernatural world, and their understanding of that liminal connection has an impact on their actions, their epistemologies, and the way they have told their stories over time. This chapter is the only one that does not depend heavily on popular culture.
Part VI—perhaps the entire reason for the division of the book into both parts and chapters—encompasses two chapters on Afrofuturism and Octavia Butler’s work in science fiction. Chapter 6, in which Jamie A. Thomas links Butler’s Kindred to the events of Breonna Taylor’s death in 2020, examines disability and repeated time travel—both to the era of enslavement in 1815 and also to the misogynoir of the present. This chapter is a highlight of the book. Its seamless shifts between summarizing events in Kindred—and its reflection, again and again, of how current events present Black women with an element of perpetual time travel in the present—are riveting. In chapter 7, a subsequent discussion of Kindred and Parable of the Sower (both by Butler) and the legacy of Butler’s literary presence, Kathryn Heffner presents a nuanced analysis of death and disability in the context of care networks. Heffner centralizes the importance of disability both in the present and the future and engages the idea that disability is not only not something that should be erased through scientific advancement, but can actually function as a gift-giving superpower in the future.
Brian Butlag calls attention to the liminality between agency (individualism) and structure (collectivism) in an examination of The Matrix in chapter 8, and uses multiple examples to reveal the ways in which the characters walk the fine line both societally and in their own precarious lives. The application of Foucauldian discourse to explore body construction, sexual expression, and masculine dominance in the film franchise is both compelling and useful to those who wish to explore below the surface of popular film. In chapter 9 the ubiquitous and defining Star Wars films are the locus of investigation in transhumanism and cyborg culture by Freya Fenton. With brief forays into Star Trek, novels, video games, and cartoons, Fenton points out the ways that cyborgs run the gamut from innocent to deadly, and people’s reactions to them run from welcoming (or even comical) to horrified.
Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy closes out the chapters as co-editor Rebecca Gibson focuses on ancillaries who may or may not be capable of individuation. Using lenses of “food and drink, gender and sex, religion and rituals, and language, and how they are woven into our ideas of personhood, death, and liminality” as categories of resistance to a collective (162), Gibson plunges the reader into names, places, and identities, while exploring the nature of humanity. In the section titled Afterword—Then, Now, and After, co-editors Gibson and VanderVeen alert the readers to the importance of cultural mediation in the determination of what makes a human being, and call—quite effectively—for the emphasis on pluralities rather than mere binaries. It elegantly ties all of the major points of the book together.
The overall success of Global Perspectives on the Liminality of the Supernatural: from Animus to Zombi lies in the ways in which the different authors draw just as easily from science fiction and popular culture as from mythology and folklore. All of them go into great detail about the plots and characters of the works they discuss, and the reader risks getting lost in the weeds sometimes, but ultimately one is left with some riveting stories supported by new light. Chapters are inconsistent in their connection to the liminality of the book’s title, but the broad range of approaches is liminality itself; it is up to the reader to span the connections and allow the different chapters to exist between mythology and science fiction, or between popular and traditional. Scholars whose own work spans any two of those intersections will find rich material to examine, whether among the night creatures of Australian horror fiction or the undead puppets of Chinese television.
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[Review length: 1,258 words • Review posted on September 25, 2023]