Anne Rice’s phenomenally popular 1976 tale of bloodlust and bloodshed, Interview with a Vampire, transferred to the small screen recently – but
Blade as an allegory of sorts for the now-decades of anxiety surrounding Barack Obama’s racial and national heritage. The comparison, while specific, is solid:
Blade’s central conflicts all reflect the anxiety of purity logics rendered as a tool of oppression.
A human-vampire hybrid known as the “Daywalker,” Blade (Wesley Snipes) supposedly moves with “the best of both worlds,” which is more to say that his vulnerabilities aren’t immediately legible. In this world, the vampires have their own hierarchy of “pure bloods” (those born vampire) who laud power over those merely turned. Where Blade sees his vampirism as something equivalent to contaminate and curse (following the likeness of earlier Black vampires), Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) sees in his hybridity the opportunity to obliterate the vampire hierarchy and seize dominance over humankind through invocation of La Magra, the Blood God, said to unleash a “vampire apocalypse.” The Daywalker’s blood is, o
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America’s first vampire was Black: How a gothic story from the 1800s advocated for emancipation of slaves
Posted by TheConversation | Feb 1, 2021 | Syndicated
By Sam George,
Associate Professor of Research, University of Hertfordshire
In April of 1819, a London periodical, the “New Monthly Magazine,” published “The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.” Notice of its publication quickly appeared in papers in the United States.
Byron was at the time enjoying remarkable popularity and this new tale, supposedly by the famous poet, caused a sensation as did its reprintings in Boston’s Atheneum (15 June) and Baltimore’s Robinson’s Magazine (26 June). The Vampyre did away with the East European peasant vampire of old. It took this monster out of the forests, gave him an aristocratic lineage and placed him into the drawing rooms of Romantic-era England. It was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and completely recast the folklore and mythology