Ecologies of blood in Johannesburg vampire fiction. Issue 4 (1st October 2016)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Ecologies of blood in Johannesburg vampire fiction. Issue 4 (1st October 2016)
- Main Title:
- Ecologies of blood in Johannesburg vampire fiction
- Authors:
- Wright, Timothy
- Abstract:
- Abstract: This essay reads two contemporary Johannesburg vampire narratives, the film Eternity (2010) and the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), as part of a body of fiction that sees post-apartheid Johannesburg as a laboratory for new forms of life. While recent Johannesburg science fiction has imagined the emergence of new and more fluid forms of being in Johannesburg, the vampire narrative employs a far older and more restrictive type of monster. By virtue of its intimate relationship to blood – with its mythical overtones of racial and national essence – and its peculiarly blank and limited form of being, the vampire is a productive figure for imagining whiteness. In this essay, I examine how the Johannesburg vampire registers the mutations of whiteness in the post-apartheid context. Located in a contaminated and contaminating city of hidden capillaries and networks, vampiric blood runs across and perforates the traditional blood bonds of race, family, and nation. Indeed, dependent on a precarious and potentially diseased resource, the Johannesburg vampire is always on the cusp of dissolving the very whiteness it figures. I am interested in the way in which these vampire narratives alternately reinforce and interrogate what I call the politics of prolongation; that is, in the ways in which their horizontal and entangled "haemopoetics" attempt to displace the genealogical poetics of blood that have traditionally suffused the colonial enterprise and its literature.
- Is Part Of:
- Safundi. Volume 17:Issue 4(2016)
- Journal:
- Safundi
- Issue:
- Volume 17:Issue 4(2016)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 17, Issue 4 (2016)
- Year:
- 2016
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 4
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2016-0017-0004-0000
- Page Start:
- 384
- Page End:
- 406
- Publication Date:
- 2016-10-01
- Subjects:
- Johannesburg -- fantasy -- science fiction -- whiteness -- vampire -- blood
South Africa -- History -- Periodicals
United States -- History -- Periodicals
968 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17533171.asp ↗
http://www.tandfonline.com/ ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1080/17533171.2016.1226729 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 1753-3171
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 8069.190000
British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 49.xml