Abstract
The very nature of the vampire can be seen to embody both the violence of history and the recurrence of traumatic memory, not least through the act of their transformation from human to vampire, their subsequent feeding and extreme longevity. Traditionally, the result of this act of transformation was the separation and segregation of the vampire from the ‘normalized’ human species, positioning the vampire as Otherness incarnate. Recently, though, the separation between the vampire and the human has been problematized through the figure of the modern vampire in late twentieth and early twenty-first century literature, film and television. Some contemporary literature and films continue to conform to this traditional view of the vampire, for example, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (2004) and its subsequent film adaptations Let the Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson, 2010) and Let Me In (dir. Matt Reeves, 2010). Other representations offer a very different perspective on the relationship between the human and vampire that allows for the possibility of integration; however, the suturing of social and temporal disruptions disavows easy solutions in this creation of spaces for negotiation and agency.
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recent intercultural and multicultural feminist theory constructs possible post-colonial, nongeneric, and irredeemably specific figures of critical subjectivity, consciousness, and humanity — not in the sacred image of the same, but in the self-critical practice of ‘difference’, of the I and we that is/are never identical to itself, and so has hope of connection to others.
(Haraway, 1992, p. 87)
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© 2013 Simon Bacon
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Bacon, S. (2013). The Vampiric Diaspora: The Complications of Victimhood and Post-memory as Configured in the Jewish Migrant Vampire. In: Mutch, D. (eds) The Modern Vampire and Human Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230370142_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230370142_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35069-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37014-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)