Meta-Dracula: Contagion and the Colonial Gothic

Abstract

This essay, excerpted with permission from my recent book Epidemic Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is about the colonial Gothic and the appearance therein of the paradigm of contagion as a metonym for political violence. I show how Bram Stoker's Dracula, the most enduring and popular novel in this archive, is so capacious in its allegorical accommodations that it has been read as incorporating nearly every threat and monster of its own time and place, as well as those of its scenes of critical reception. More than indexing historical referents, I argue, the novel is a kind of allegory of allegories, producing new epistemes about multisystemic threats and carrying them forward into the crises of our own moment-global pandemic, terrorism, the collapse of empires. Following Fanon, who invokes the rich mythology of the vampire to point out colonial discourse's specific habits of dehumanization, we can locate Dracula in an important archive of colonial writing that sets the 'science' of monsters on its infinite course and advances a reading practice that borrows from the surveillance apparatus and epidemic narrative strategies of colonial disease literature. Because of its extraordinary durability, Dracula is a crucial textual conduit in the transmission of minor ideas about the circulation of terror, rebellion, racialized bodies, foreign materials, and communicable disease from largely forgotten nineteenth-century texts and contexts into the common sense of late empire and late capitalism. Although Dracula is not a terribly self-conscious, systematically researched, or ideologically consistent text, it is decisive in its effects.