American Vampire Research Articles

The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction by Jerry Rafiki Jenkins

The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction by Jerry Rafiki Jenkins

Fanged Future: A review of Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction

Fanged FutureA review of Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction Johanna Isaacson (bio) Jenkins, Jerry Rafiki. The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction. Ohio UP, 2019. At the mention of the word "vampire," a waxen figure of European origin leaps to mind. However, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins insists in The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction that vampire myths have an under-explored heritage in Africa and African diasporic cultures, and that recent African American vampirology offers a subaltern approach to the genre rather than merely a sub-generic borrowing of Dracula-derived tropes. A figure conjured to navigate the horrors of colonial violence and enslavement through the nineteenth century, the black vampire re-emerges in 1970s vampire films such as Ganja and Hess and Blacula. These works inform the black vampire fiction to come and the resurrection of seemingly white vampire mythology such as the Dracula film adaptations of 1979 and 1992 (4). Yet studies of vampire mythology ignore or minimize the influence of the black vampire (6). In Paradox, Jenkins fills this lacuna by offering a detailed analysis of five black vampire fiction novels. He argues that in their articulation of race and sexuality through the "paradox of mortality," these texts counter monolithic notions of blackness. In particular, they diverge from conservative religious visions of black unity and insist on an antinormative project that not only queers the traditional vampire narrative, the black literary imagination, and their guises of universality, but it also … has the potential to denormalize our disdain of hybridity, our boundaries of power, and our obsession with utopias. (8) Jenkins provides insightful, original, and often compelling readings of works that have been excluded from the canon of vampire fiction largely due to their racial concerns, although the book would have benefited from a more rigorous engagement with scholarly work that complicates categories of race and sexuality. His book is part of an important new series from Ohio University Press; New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative (edited by Susana M. Morris and Kinitra D. Brooks) promises to recognize the significance of African American speculative culture in varied media. Central to Jenkins's exploration of the implicit ideologies in the five novels is Steven Cave's taxonomy of four immortality narratives that cultures adapt to grapple with the "morality paradox": the fact that we must die but cannot concretely imagine death (Jenkins 11). Cave's taxonomy includes the "staying alive" narrative, the resurrection narrative, the soul narrative, and the legacy narrative. For Jenkins, most black vampire novels reject soul and legacy narratives in favor of resurrection and staying alive narratives. The latter insist on the corporeality of the black body, and must therefore navigate black earthly experience, black appearance and its meaning, and black physical pain, along with the hope for an earthly freedom from this pain. While the vampire's status as corporeal undead points to the conception that black identity is defined by the appearance of blackness, Jenkins argues that the novels he explores complicate this notion and instead ask "whether there is more to being black than having a black body" (16). His readings imply that race is ascriptive rather than an inherent part of the body. At times he acknowledges the intractable, structural process of racialization "in a society where economic forms are racialized, and pain is colored black" (27). However, Jenkins returns to a hope of transcending race through the imaginary of black vampire hybridity. In these moments of transcendence, his analysis risks becoming ahistorical. The immortal status of the vampires Jenkins analyzes allows them to stand outside of time, forming a "post-racial" horizon. Yet the paths to this post-historical status do not dismantle the structures of domination that persistently reinscribe race. The periodization of racialized capitalism is particularly relevant to the gothic mode, as Stephen Shapiro argues in his analysis of Dracula and other Victorian gothic tropes. Historical moments of crisis and rupture reveal the uncanniness of commodity fetishism: the condition in which workers are separated from any possibility of life outside capitalism and are fully alienated from their bodies, which become "units of labor-power...

The old monster in the new world: The Americanization of the vampire

Abstract This article sets out to explore how the vampire, a quintessential European monster which has been related to aristocracy, blood purity and colonialism, has been radically transformed following its migration to America. By adapting to the conditions of the New World, the creature has been Americanized by gradually abandoning its European traits – a process similar to the one described by exponents of Americanization such as Frederick Jackson Turner. During this transformation, the creature that once was a destructive force of nature has essentially been humanized. Instead of an animated corpse that lurks in the shadows, the vampire becomes a historian and an agent of history, occasionally a positive one. In this re-imagination of the American vampire we can discern ideas of American exceptionalism. At the same time, this transformation allows the vampire to become a vocal critic of the negative aspects of American history. The article explores the Americanization of the vampire by underlining the balance between the concepts of the vampire as an agent of American superiority and as a reliable narrator of the country’s history as expressed in seminal works of American vampire fiction.

Skinner Sweet, American Vampire

In their series American Vampire, Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque create a new breed of vampire, one specific to America. In the full-length collections of their current series, Snyder and Albuquerque explore issues of American identity through the improbable birth and activities of this new breed and those who encounter it. Reborn as a vampire during the American west of the 1880s, Skinner Sweet embodies an American identity defined by the myth of the west and the American Dream it gave birth to. As an outlaw both in the eyes of the law as well as in the eyes of the older, European clans, Skinner embodies the spirit of revolution against tradition that has become one of the cornerstones of American identity associated with American frontier of rugged individualism. Similarly, as the first vampire born in America (in a space generally acknowledged as the birthplace of the American mythology), the ruthless killer Skinner also embodies the savagery associated with the Native Americans; and, like members of other indigenous tribes, Skinner is hunted by white lawmen for his crimes against civilization. As such, Skinner is both the savage “native” American whose execution is sought by the “civilized” whites, as well as the brash American seeking his Emersonian independence from European tradition. In the subsequent storylines, Skinner Sweet finds himself at various iconic moments of American cultural history: Hollywood in the 1920s, Las Vegas in the 1930s, and the Second World War. By placing Skinner in these moments, Snyder and Albuquerque select a specific timeline by which to chart America’s development.

Promoting the Vampire Rights Amendment: Public relations, postfeminism and True Blood

Scholarship on public relations in popular culture presents an uncritical and unproblematic understanding of the representation of public relations. The aim of this study is to offer an alternative reading by examining a television series, which foregrounds public relations techniques and irony, and by situating this study within postfeminist scholarship and the vampire genre. It analyses the representation of public relations in HBO's television series, True Blood, focusing on the campaign to pass the Vampire Rights Amendment run by American Vampire League. The findings reveal there is no single reality of public relations. Instead, multiple discourses of public relations invite the audience to engage critically with public relations concepts and meaning-making. The representation of a powerful, female practitioner highlights the paradoxes of postfeminism and does not resolve gender issues. Public relations scholars must begin to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the processes of representation in popular culture, including the subversive use of humour and irony to encourage critique of normative ideals, and the significance for popular understandings of, and engagement with, public relations.

Gothic Vancouver: Blood Ties and Vampire Television

Vancouver is not necessarily the first topic that springs to mind when discussing the production of vampire television. In an attempt to remedy this, the vampire television series Blood Ties (2007) is considered in relation to its Canadian production context. I explore the series' political economy within an international framework (its production and distribution in Canada and its scheduling/exhibition and reception in the UK), suggesting that the Canadian qualities of the series are often wilfully ignored in distribution and reception. The ultimate failure of the series (running for only one season) is then located in relationship to the recent explosion of vampire fiction on domestic screens, where I suggest that Blood Ties inspires a form of Gothic television distinct from the American vampire series True Blood (2008-).

"Between Memory and History": The Nineteenth Century in Jewelle Gomez's Vampire Novel <i>The Gilda Stories</i> and the TV Series <i>True Blood</i>

This article examines two American vampire narratives that depict the perspective and memories of a main character who is turned into a vampire in the US in the nineteenth century: Jewelle Gomez’s ...

The Vampire: A Casebook (review)

Reviewed by: The Vampire: A Casebook Felicia Faye McMahon The Vampire: A Casebook. Ed. Alan Dundes. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 182, preface, selected bibliography, index.) One of Alan Dundes' more recent works is the eighth in his casebook series. It is a specialist's book aimed at folklorists rather than a book with general appeal. Dundes is to be commended for his attention to the subject of vampire folklore, which suffers from a dearth of scholarly research. Nonetheless, his latest casebook is far less compelling than his earlier casebooks, and it is not without limitations. This edited work consists of 11 essays, the last of which is written by Dundes himself. In his "The Vampire as Bloodthirsty Revenant: A Psychoanalytic Post Mortem," he admits that "the final essay in this volume is an attempt by a folklorist with a confessed Freudian bias to interpret the vampire as a creature of legend" (p. 159). Unfortunately, in a preceding chapter, "The Greek Vampire: A Study of Cyclic Symbolism in Marriage and Death" by Juliette Du Boulet, the reader has already suffered through a similar structural approach. This lack of variety in interpretation literally sucks the life from vampire lore. The organization of the casebook, however, is fully adequate. The first chapter by Katharina M. Wilson, "The History of the Word Vampire, " is followed by early, published articles on vampires such as Agnes Murgoci's "The Vampire in Roumania," published in 1926 in the journal Folk-Lore. Surprisingly, Dundes does not discuss Norine Dresser's American Vampire: Fans, Victims, Practitioners (W. W. Norton and Company, 1989), although he includes her book in his select bibliography. Dresser provides significant current information in chapters such as "Vampirism Today," in which she discusses the impact of diseases such as AIDS on living vampire lore in America, an insightful stance that could have improved Dundes' book. Of the essays that are included in this volume, Paul Barber's "Forensic Pathology and the European Vampire" is by far the most intriguing. Although the folklorist may take issue with Barber's attempt to demystify the vampire, Barber, nonetheless, provides an alternative explanation to the historicity of the vampire image offered by Dundes. Other readers may find the inclusion of Philip D. Jaffé and Frank Dicataldo's "Clinical Vampirism: Blending Myth and Reality" somewhat novel but problematic. The authors confuse the issue by claiming that "cases of clinical vampirism are sufficiently rare" (p. 148) and further that "the relationship of vampirism to psychopathology is complicated by the low incidence of this behavior" (p. 152). Inclusion of this chapter, then, only reminds the reader of the paucity of serious published scholarly research available to vampire scholars. The stark realism of the cover design for The Vampire: A Casebook comes to represent the reductionist nature of the structural interpretations of vampire folklore. Rather than understanding vampire lore past and present, the reader is left with the notion that belief in vampires is a long-dead tradition. From my own limited first-hand experience with vampire traditions, this is untrue. When I think of my own experience with Romanian friends, I find Dundes' structural interpretation of their rich belief system sadly lacking: They [vampires] are thirsty because death is debirth; the transit to the other world is the reverse of the birth process, that is, the movement through the birth canal. To be reborn, the deceased must undo death, that is, be born again. If death is truly debirth, then reversing the death process would be equivalent to rebirth. It is almost mathematical. Death is the negative of life, but the negation of death is once again life. Minus a minus equals a plus! [p. 170] One wonders how Dundes would apply his Freudian Oedipal framework to non-Western peoples, some of whom also have vampire folklore. Yet, maybe his attempt to bring attention [End Page 487] to what he calls "a remarkable living legend" will generate a renewed interest in collection and interpretation of this ancient and complex tradition. Felicia Faye McMahon Syracuse University Copyright © 2002 American Folklore Society

Plasma sex steroid binding in Chiroptera.

Plasma steroid binding was examined in samples obtained from seven species of bats representing four different families. A specific sex steroid-binding protein (SBP) was identified by steady-state polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in representatives of two families, the phyllostomids and the vespertilionids. In these species, as in primates, SBP not only exhibited high affinity for the androgens testosterone and dihydrotestosterone (DHT), but also for estradiol. A specific SBP was not identified in the tropical American vampire bat or in the two species of pteropodids examined. In all species examined, except for the vampire bat, a specific corticosteroid-binding globulin (CBG) was also identified. In addition to binding glucocorticoids, CBG in these species appeared to bind androgens as well.

The fetal membranes and placentation of the tropical American vampire bat Desmodus rotundus murinus, with notes on the histochemistry of the placenta.

The fetal membranes and placentation of the tropical American vampire bat Desmodus rotundus murinus, with notes on the histochemistry of the placenta.

Reproduction and the female reproductive cycle in the tropical american vampire bat, desmodus rotundus murinus.

American Journal of AnatomyVolume 91, Issue 3 p. 415-445 Article Reproduction and the female reproductive cycle in the tropical American vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus murinus William A. Wimsatt, William A. Wimsatt Laboratory of Histology and Embryology, Department of Zoology, Cornell University and Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, PanamaSearch for more papers by this authorHarold Trapido, Harold Trapido Laboratory of Histology and Embryology, Department of Zoology, Cornell University and Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, PanamaSearch for more papers by this author William A. Wimsatt, William A. Wimsatt Laboratory of Histology and Embryology, Department of Zoology, Cornell University and Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, PanamaSearch for more papers by this authorHarold Trapido, Harold Trapido Laboratory of Histology and Embryology, Department of Zoology, Cornell University and Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, PanamaSearch for more papers by this author First published: November 1952 https://doi.org/10.1002/aja.1000910304Citations: 38AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume91, Issue3November 1952Pages 415-445 RelatedInformation