Dracula and Tropic Death: Imagined Maps, Transnational Communities, 2018
Dracula and Tropic Death: Imagined Maps, Transnational Communities
The history of scholarship su... more Dracula and Tropic Death: Imagined Maps, Transnational Communities
The history of scholarship surrounding what manner of threat Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula represents to Britain has been a colourful and contested one. Though that threat is more often consigned to Britain’s east, Britain’s often overlooked colonial interests to her west, particularly those interests in Ireland and the Caribbean, also form part of the cross hatch of the count’s composition. Though Dracula is traditionally read as a novel which seeks to solidify the integrity of national bounds, Stoker in fact works diligently throughout to map transnational spaces and identities which defy national and ethnic borders. Eric Walrond’s short story collection Tropic Death (which includes Caribbean strains of vampire mythology), is sketched in similar shades: all the stories collected are haunted by the spectre of British colonisation (though from the perspective of the colony) and the threat posed to any vestiges of Empire by anticolonial assertion. Additionally, Walrond demonstrates an analogous interest in spatial and identity penumbras which resist ethnic/cultural absolutes and push the collection beyond the regionalism of its Caribbean settings. My paper suggests that in plotting ever ‘widening gyres’ of geographic co-ordinates, and pausing in ‘cross cultural’/global spaces like Panama and London, Walrond and Stoker ‘imagine [transnational] communities’ in the vein of Benedict Anderson. Both map spaces which speak towards globalising notions of citizenship, identity and belonging made larger by the ever-widening reach of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Dracula and Tropic Death: Imagined Maps, Transnational Communities, 2018
Dracula and Tropic Death: Imagined Maps, Transnational Communities
The history of scholarship su... more Dracula and Tropic Death: Imagined Maps, Transnational Communities
The history of scholarship surrounding what manner of threat Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula represents to Britain has been a colourful and contested one. Though that threat is more often consigned to Britain’s east, Britain’s often overlooked colonial interests to her west, particularly those interests in Ireland and the Caribbean, also form part of the cross hatch of the count’s composition. Though Dracula is traditionally read as a novel which seeks to solidify the integrity of national bounds, Stoker in fact works diligently throughout to map transnational spaces and identities which defy national and ethnic borders. Eric Walrond’s short story collection Tropic Death (which includes Caribbean strains of vampire mythology), is sketched in similar shades: all the stories collected are haunted by the spectre of British colonisation (though from the perspective of the colony) and the threat posed to any vestiges of Empire by anticolonial assertion. Additionally, Walrond demonstrates an analogous interest in spatial and identity penumbras which resist ethnic/cultural absolutes and push the collection beyond the regionalism of its Caribbean settings. My paper suggests that in plotting ever ‘widening gyres’ of geographic co-ordinates, and pausing in ‘cross cultural’/global spaces like Panama and London, Walrond and Stoker ‘imagine [transnational] communities’ in the vein of Benedict Anderson. Both map spaces which speak towards globalising notions of citizenship, identity and belonging made larger by the ever-widening reach of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Papers by Louise Walsh
The history of scholarship surrounding what manner of threat Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula represents to Britain has been a colourful and contested one. Though that threat is more often consigned to Britain’s east, Britain’s often overlooked colonial interests to her west, particularly those interests in Ireland and the Caribbean, also form part of the cross hatch of the count’s composition. Though Dracula is traditionally read as a novel which seeks to solidify the integrity of national bounds, Stoker in fact works diligently throughout to map transnational spaces and identities which defy national and ethnic borders. Eric Walrond’s short story collection Tropic Death (which includes Caribbean strains of vampire mythology), is sketched in similar shades: all the stories collected are haunted by the spectre of British colonisation (though from the perspective of the colony) and the threat posed to any vestiges of Empire by anticolonial assertion. Additionally, Walrond demonstrates an analogous interest in spatial and identity penumbras which resist ethnic/cultural absolutes and push the collection beyond the regionalism of its Caribbean settings.
My paper suggests that in plotting ever ‘widening gyres’ of geographic co-ordinates, and pausing in ‘cross cultural’/global spaces like Panama and London, Walrond and Stoker ‘imagine [transnational] communities’ in the vein of Benedict Anderson. Both map spaces which speak towards globalising notions of citizenship, identity and belonging made larger by the ever-widening reach of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The history of scholarship surrounding what manner of threat Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula represents to Britain has been a colourful and contested one. Though that threat is more often consigned to Britain’s east, Britain’s often overlooked colonial interests to her west, particularly those interests in Ireland and the Caribbean, also form part of the cross hatch of the count’s composition. Though Dracula is traditionally read as a novel which seeks to solidify the integrity of national bounds, Stoker in fact works diligently throughout to map transnational spaces and identities which defy national and ethnic borders. Eric Walrond’s short story collection Tropic Death (which includes Caribbean strains of vampire mythology), is sketched in similar shades: all the stories collected are haunted by the spectre of British colonisation (though from the perspective of the colony) and the threat posed to any vestiges of Empire by anticolonial assertion. Additionally, Walrond demonstrates an analogous interest in spatial and identity penumbras which resist ethnic/cultural absolutes and push the collection beyond the regionalism of its Caribbean settings.
My paper suggests that in plotting ever ‘widening gyres’ of geographic co-ordinates, and pausing in ‘cross cultural’/global spaces like Panama and London, Walrond and Stoker ‘imagine [transnational] communities’ in the vein of Benedict Anderson. Both map spaces which speak towards globalising notions of citizenship, identity and belonging made larger by the ever-widening reach of capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.