Bangungot: Dreams, Nightmares, and Tsismis in R. Zamora Linmark's Leche

Kritika Kultura is inviting everyone to the first installment of its Lecture Series for the First Semester AY 2023-2024. The lecture titled--Bangungot: Dreams, Nightmares, and Tsismis in R. Zamora Linmark's Leche--by David Siglos, Jr. of the University of California, Riverside will be held on August 22, 2023 (Tuesday), 5:00 PM, at the Natividad Galang Fajardo Conference Room, De La Costa Hall, Ateneo de Manila University.

In keeping with the University's health and security protocols, attendees are kindly enjoined to register via bit.ly/KKLectureBANGUNGOTAug22 by August 18, 2023 (Friday).

Abstract. My lecture conceptualizes bangungot as a narrative means of surfacing and accessing the dreams, desires, and pleasures of Filipinos, and uses tsismis as a mode of narrative analysis. Through Leche, I also explore the relationship between bangungot and authoritarianism in the Philippines. Bangungot loosely translates to “nightmare,” a mere bad dream, but in the Filipino context, it can leave its prey (often young, healthy men) dead. Bangungot has been linked to SUNDS, or sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome, common in Southeast Asia and its diaspora. As such, I also investigate, through bangungot, the limits of medical narratives—e.g., autopsies and diagnoses, which have been the main mode of inquiry around bangungot. Due to its superstitious and folkloric qualities, bangungot, I argue, opens alternative narrative forms and lifeways. I also utilize tsismis, or gossip, not only as a “destructuring device” (Lisa Lowe) but as a mode of Filipino social organization that has both official and unofficial, real and superstitious, repercussions.

Bio. David Siglos Jr. is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation project, entitled “Arte-culations: The Novel Form and the Filipino Style of Being,” explores contemporary Filipino American novels to describe the inner-workings of what he calls “the Filipino style of being.” The project argues that to think about the Filipino culture as a style is to account for its aesthetic production and provide a historical context which corresponds with Philippine conditions of modernity. David’s research interests include 20 th–21st  Century American and Asian American Literature, Filipino Anglophone Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Global Modernism, Nationalism and Narrative, Media Studies, and Theater and Performance. This Fall, David will be starting as a visiting faculty of Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.