ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the literary adaptation of Chinese-Malaysian diasporic author Yangsze Choo’s novel, The Ghost Bride (2013), to a six-episode Malaysian-Taiwanese Netflix original series (January 2020) in order to explore how ancient Chinese folklore (ghost-marriage or spirit-wedding) is reconceived and reconstructed as a popular cultural product by a transnational media production. The chapter focuses on how the mechanism of Netflix’s global marketing strategies has effectively manipulated the problematic trope of fetishizing localism in its adaptation of Choo’s novel in order to produce a risk-averse franchise, appealing to a wider, global audience. Netflix’s adaptation glamorizes the diverse and marginal cultural practices of the Peranakans, which fashions an alternative way of commodifying the other. Consequently, literary adaptation in the twenty-first century fetishizes local cultures for global enjoyment and illustrates complex neo-colonial dynamics that are deliberately controlled and governed by the shrewd economics of consumption, production, and marketing strategies.
