Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires

Dark Blood

T. Khair, Johan Höglund, T. Khair, Johan Höglund

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137272621
• Categoría: Littérature
• Categoría: Théorie de la critique littéraire

Throughout the ages, vampires have transgressed the borders of gender, race, class, propriety and nations. This collection examines the vampire as a postcolonial and transnational phenomenon that maps the fear of the Other, the ravenous hunger of Empires and the transcultural rifts and intercultural common grounds that make up global society today.

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Introduction: Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires

Johan Höglund and Tabish Khair

When Jonathan Harker, deep in the Transylvanian mountains, embarks on the final stage of his journey towards Count Dracula’s residence, he overhears the frightened natives whispering ‘Denn die Todten reiten Schnell’ – ‘for the dead travel fast’. Dracula, in the disguise of Harker’s driver, flashes a gleaming smile in the speaker’s direction causing great consternation and much crossing. The vampire then drives Harker into an unholy night full of howling wolves and strange omens, taking the hapless Englishman the final few miles to the castle that, in many ways, marks the border between East and West or between the imagined self of Europe and the Oriental Other.

Indeed, the dead travel both fast and wide in narrative. The vampire has always been a traveller and the vampire story frequently explores and transgresses national, sexual, racial and cultural boundaries. Appearing in many cultures during different epochs, the vampire is not only a wandering creature but also a shape changer. As Tabish Khair observes in this collection, though with reservations about cross-cultural equating, undead ‘demons’ appear in Indian literature at least as early as the eleventh century, though they take culture-specific shapes. In China, the undead and jumping jiang shi have been part of folklore for hundreds of years, as has the Greek vampire: the Vrykolakas, and the Rumanian Strigoi, perhaps the most direct forbears of the modern vampire. During the nineteenth century, when the vampire became a staple of the imperial Victorian Gothic, this creature continues to travel and to change, moving between different geographical and social settings and taking on several and seemingly contradictory shapes. The vampire is first imagined in British prose as a nobleman and sexual predator in The Vampyre (1819) by Lord Byron’s physician John Polidori. It then takes on female form, and is used to explore alternative sexualities, in Le Fanu’s Carmilla from 1872. The year 1897 saw the vampire manifest not only as the transforming and transformative Transylvanian Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s central novel, but also as the Caribbean succubus Harriet in Florence Marryat’s recently rediscovered Blood of the Vampire.

The publication of Dracula, a narrative where many of the European folkloristic elements converge, marks the institutionalization of the authoritative European vampire who is afraid of garlic and Christian symbols, and who cannot cross water or exist in the sunlight. However, the vampire continues to transform and travel even after the appearance of the notorious Count. As Ken Gelder has shown in his study Reading the Vampire (1994), Dracula was extensively translated, filmed, televised and rewritten during the twentieth century. In this way, the Transylvanian Count embarks on a transcultural process of his own, negotiating and violating new national, sexual and imperial borders. While never quite out of fashion during the previous century, the vampire has arguably never spread as far and wide as during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Hollywood, in Japanese Manga and Korean art film, in video games, in pulp fiction and on the New York Times bestseller list, the vampire continues to evolve and degenerate, proliferate and disperse. Through its itinerant ways and transformative body, the old and modern vampire take the reader on trips from the imperial metropolis into the colonial periphery, to the places where East and West intersect, where stable cultural categories clash, collapse and transform, allowing both the human and the political body to take new and often disturbing forms.

Thus, the vampire narrative effectively and continuously maps transnational, colonial and postcolonial concerns. The relationship between the vampire and transnational and colonial issues has been noted in literature and the British vampire in particular has been explored from this perspective. In his important essay from 1990, ‘The Occidental Tourist’, Stephen D. Arata argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula can be viewed as an Eastern terrorist imperialist, a being set on bringing the horrors of colonization to the British. Similar claims have been made by other scholars of the late Victorian Gothic, including Patrick Brantlinger, Judith Halberstam, Kelly Hurley and Ken Gelder, all of whom have discussed Stoker’s vampire as a tran s cultural demon who embodies the many anxieties that plagued the British during the fin de siècle.

The present collection seeks to organize and expand such readings of the vampire through a series of essays that together consider the vampire narrative as a global and transcultural phenomenon. If, as Tabish Khair has suggested in The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009), the Gothic is the writing of Otherness, the vampire is perhaps the creature that most frequently has been manifested as the Other in literature and film. To understand this strangely menacing and popular creature has arguably never been more important than it is today, in the wake not only of globalization and the worldwide dispersion of culture this has entailed, but also in relation to the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As Glennis Byron and Aspasia Stephanou observe in their contribution to this book, postcolonial critics have recently argued that the US venture into the Middle East has made it absurd ‘to speak of ours as a postcolonial world’. This situation makes it eminently important to keep an eye on the journeys and permutations of the global vampire.

With the intention to explore both this and other colonial, postcolonial and transnational contexts, this book collects a number of important and readable studies of the transnational and postcolonial vampire. A number of these are written by writers who have been central in opening up and shaping the field of postcolonial Gothic studies. Other contributions have been produced by scholars who build on, discuss and modify the existing understanding of what informs the postcolonial or transnational vampire, but who also observe how this vampire sometimes transcends culture to operate as a problematic signifier in various media.

The contributions cover a wide range of topics and a broad array of vampirism, effectively illustrating the extent to which the vampire has infected and transformed our understanding of past and present, colonial and postcolonial, imperialism and neo-imperialism. The editors’ intention was to include essays that explore and open up the field and not to drive a transfixing stake into the heart of the vampire. As such, the essays differ in focus and approach: while most of them deal with textual and filmic instances of the transcultural and transgressive vampire figure, in different shapes, at least two essays also lean towards a more metaphorical exploration of the vampire; while most essays focus on specific texts, some also adopt a more survey-based approach. This mix, the editors felt, was not just demanded by the topic but would also be of particular use to scholars and, especially, students who employ this collection to open up areas for further research.

After the interesting and thought-provoking foreword by Elleke Boehmer and this general introduction, the essays have been organized according to overlapping thematic concerns, moving from largely literary engagements to increasingly politicized readings on vampire literature and of vampire media metaphors in the light of the post-9/11 world. This also means that starting with an examination of ‘colonial’ and ‘classical’ vampire texts the essays expand to cover various more recent and postcolonial texts and films – Irish, Canadian, South Asian, Australian, Caribbean, Black British, etc. – and end up addressing some current neocolonial aspects.

Ireland’s colonial vampires

Since its first appearance in English fiction, the ageless vampire has haunted European history in many different ways. One of the premises of this collection, and of several important studies on the vampire (see Punter, Gelder, Byron, Arata), is that this haunting is intimately tied to imperialism and colonialism and to the many anxieties that accompanied these practices. From this perspective, it is interesting that the most important British interventions into the vampire genre, Carmilla and Dracula, were produced by Irish writers. The ways in which texts by these writers negotiate British colonialism in Ireland is explored by Robert A. Smart in the collection’s first contribution, ‘Postcolonial Dread and the Gothic: Refashioning Identity in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. In his thorough study of two of the most important representatives not only of the Irish Gothic but of vampire writing per se, Smart notes that through the Gothic, and the image of the vampire in particular, the Catholic Irish could be made to embody the twin position of abject monster and desirable other. While this representation of the colonized (Irish) as vampires helped to enable British hegemony by making metaphorical sense of the repeated ‘reconquests’ of colonial territory, the Irish Gothic also problematized the imperial project by denying the reader final closure. In both Carmilla (1872) and Dracula, as in a great many later vampire narratives, there is a sense that the invasion of British territory and identity is not over with the closing of the narrative; the undead will keep rising from their graves as long as the existing power relationship is in place. In addition to this, Smart’s essay importantly revisits the Irish vampire’s taste for blood and relates this to a colonial and religious dynamic.

Interestingly, the vampire has also been used in modern times to interrogate the relationship and confrontation between Catholic Ireland and imperial Britain. Maria Beville’s analysis of Brendan Kennelly’s epic Cromwell: A Poem (1983) reveals how vampire myth is used to explore not only the violence that shook colonized Ireland during the seventeenth century but also the historicization of this period. Thus, Kennelly’s interesting poem is read by Beville as an attempt to employ the vampire myth to simultaneously give Gothic shape to the abject horrors that Cromwell’s incursion entailed and to deconstruct the colonial as well as nationalist discourses that have informed our understanding of the relationship between colonized Ireland and colonizing Britain. In her analysis of Kennelly’s dark poem, Beville also interestingly suggests that the Gothic in general and the postcolonial Gothic in particular has a revisionist potential that resituates both author and audience in relation to colonial history.

Transnational and postcolonial vampires

A crucial concept in postcolonial studies is the hybrid as explored by a number of postcolonial theorists, including Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Paul Gilroy and Mary Louise Pratt. The vampire, existing between life and death, is by nature a hybrid being. This makes it uniquely placed to inhabit various postcolonial positions. In ‘The Man-Eating Tiger and the Vampire in South Asia’, Tabish Khair covers much of the history of the vampire as Oriental Other but focuses on the vampire in South Asia. Discussing the many ways in which the vampire is at the same time absent and present in South Asian literature, Khair also traces the relationship between the Gothic vampire and the native cannibal in Orientalist discourse. However, Khair also importantly notes that the vampire in Indian literature takes on a specific Asian shape in the form of the man-eating tiger, thus accentuating the common perception of the vampire’s ability to cross literary and cultural borders.

In ‘Celebrating Difference and Community: The Vampire in African-American and Caribbean Women’s Writing’, Gina Wisker emphasizes how the hybrid, metamorphosing vampire can fulfil a key role for marginalized women writers who seek to interrogate and deconstruct the colonial prison-house of history. Covering a wide range of writers and vampire texts, Wisker importantly observes that the vampire sometimes appears as the colonizer in the postcolonial Gothic while at other times this creature is made to pose as a paradoxically regenerative Other in relation to destructive imperial practice. In relation to this, she sheds light on how the concept of (vampire) community operates in postcolonial women’s writing, arguing that this phenomenon provides a contrast and a possible antidote to the hierarchical and predatory behaviours of (neo-)imperial regimes.

The hybrid nature of the postcolonial vampire is also explored in ‘Postcolonial Vampires in the Indigenous Imagination’ by Maureen Clark. This contribution traces two different developments of the vampire in postcolonial fiction. While the colonial, late Victorian vampire embodies the geopolitical fears that Arata termed the ‘anxiety of reverse colonization’, the modern, postcolonial vampire can be imagined as a white colonizer. Clark’s interesting essay thus discusses how the vampire is reimagined as a European other in Australian fiction, lending new and powerful meaning to the vampire as he transforms into a harbinger of white imperial Armageddon. Her discussion of The Night Wanderer furthermore illustrates how imperial practice, as an aspect of the spread of global capitalism, can be pictured as vampiric and how those colonized are themselves affected by this plague.

A similar issue is raised by Justin Edwards in his contribution ‘Canada, Quebec and David Cronenberg’s Terrorist-Vampires’. Through an important historical and geographical reframing of director Cronenberg’s influential Rabid, Edwards again illustrates how the postcolonial vampire can be imagined to emanate not from the colonial periphery, but from within Western modernity itself. The vampires that terrorize the streets of Quebec in Rabid are thus a product of rampant Western medical science and at the same time closely related to contemporary and very local processes and discourses of decolonization and terrorism. In this way, Edwards discusses one of the first examples of how vampirism is stripped of its Oriental and religious connotations and instead reimagined as a peculiarly Western disease. This understanding of the vampire becomes important both in the neo-imperial vampire story and in the related zombie narratives that films such as Rabid help spawn.

In his contribution to this book, ‘Citational Vampires: Transnational Techniques of Circulation in Irma Vep, Blood: The Last Vampire and Thirst’, Ken Gelder maps some of the ways in which the transnational vampire has been pictured and re-represented in recent cinema. Covering a wide selection of films, Gelder notes that the modern vampire narrative is unremittingly self-citing, perfectly aware of and flaunting its many past reincarnations. Gelder effectively argues that while modern vampire film sometimes loses itself in the imperatives of citation, it still displaces (post/neocolonial) historical trauma through allegory. This allows films such as Blood: The Last Vampire and Thirst to furtively interrogate the horrors of the Vietnam War, the dangers (again) of modern medical science, the confrontation between (religious and cultural) selfless ideals and the many desires that globalized technologies and cultures enable.

Neocolonial vampires

As Chambers and Chaplin observe in their contribution, the modern vampire often transcends the traditional role of Oriental, monstrous other, posing instead as a misunderstood and misrepresented outsider that demands our sympathy and understanding. A further transformation of the vampire as ‘sites of identification’, as Fred Botting describes the creature (2002, p. 286), is discussed in Johan Höglund’s contribution ‘Militarizing the Vampire’. If Twilight and True Blood merge the vampire narrative with the romance tale, films belonging to the Blade or Underworld series, or Jennifer Rardin’s Jaz Parks novels, combine the war and espionage story with vampire fiction, reinventing the vampire as a clandestine warrior who supports rather than challenges the West and the modernity that it supposedly champions. This transformation marks the arrival of the militarized vampire, a creature that does not rely on its lethal, transforming and transformative body but rather on the deadly, technological advances of modernity.

This recent reinvention of the vampire as a soldier needs to be understood in relation to the War on Terror launched by the George W. Bush administration in 2001. In fact, many post-9/11 vampire narratives tap into the geopolitical upheaval that this war, fought on multiple fronts and with a plethora of weapons, brought on. In several of these recent vampire stories, the vampire again eschews the military arsenal of modernity and instead reassumes its role as a bringer of Gothic Armageddon. From this perspective, Chambers’s and Chaplin’s contribution ‘Bilqis the Vampire Slayer: Sarwat Chadda’s British Muslim Vampire Fiction’ explores how author Chadda shuns the sympathetic vampire in favour of a traditionally malign and utterly dangerous ...