Speculative memory in Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny: folklore, science fiction and the reconfiguration of cultural memory

This article examines how Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny reconfigures cultural memory through the interaction of folklore and science fiction. Drawing on cultural memory studies and speculative fiction theory, it argues that these modes offer complementary ways of making memory. Curses, ghosts, and haunted objects bring suppressed histories into the present, while robots, posthuman bodies, and imagined worlds expose unresolved social contradictions. Memory thus moves across objects, bodies, spaces, and nonhuman subjects instead of remaining a stable archive. Adapting the concept of speculative memory, the article identifies three interrelated operations: haunting return, material displacement, and speculative projection. Together, these operations reveal how the collection critically reworks relations among past, present, and future, using speculative forms to interrogate history, technology, embodiment, and social transformation.