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This article attempts to understand the importance of Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud in relation to the Eastern Question, and in particular with reference to the controversy caused by the Treaty of Berlin (1878). Centring on Dracula‘s speech on his ethnic origins, the author shows how Stoker has manipulated his sources in order to present his protagonist as being more decidedly involved in wars with the Turks than he in fact was, and in doing so to justify Disraeli‘s pro-Austrian and pro-Turkish line at the Berlin Treaty. In this the influence of Stoker‘s Turcophile brother George makes itself known. During the Bosnia crisis these views change, but are nevertheless in keeping with the conservative and patriotic line.
American zombie Gothic films have changed markedly in their tone, style, and structure since September 11, an evolution that expands the Gothic mode to include the mobility of the narratives protagonists, a popularisation of the movies, and an increased engagement with a multi-ethnic international community. To remain timely, relevant, and commercially viable, such alterations must occur, and these shifts in particular can best be explained by the changing cinematic marketplace, the influence of videogames, and the policies and anxieties resulting from the (inter)national trauma of 9/11 and the War on Terror. This essay examines the film version of World War Z as a key text for exploring the current transition from a localised siege narrative to an international kind of road trip movie, a shift largely tied to the popularity of zombie-themed videogames.
The popular cultural ubiquity of the zombie in the years following the Second World War is testament to that monster‘s remarkable ability to adapt to the social anxieties of the age. From the red-scare zombie-vampire hybrids of I Am Legend (1954) onwards, the abject alterity of the ambulant dead has been deployed as a means of interrogating everything from the war in Vietnam (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) to the evils of consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978). This essay explores how, in the years since 9/11, those questions of ethnicity and gender, regionality and power that have haunted the zombie narrative since 1968 have come to articulate the social and cultural dislocations wrought by free-market economics and the shock doctrines that underscore the will to global corporatism. The article examines these dynamics through consideration of the figure of the zombie in a range of contemporary cultural texts drawn from film, television, graphic fiction, literature and gaming, each of which articulates a sense not only neo-liberalism itself has failed but simply wont lie down and die. It is therefore argued that in an age of corporate war and economic collapse, community breakdown and state-sanctioned torture, the zombie apocalypse both realises and works through the failure of the free market, its victims shuffling through the ruins, avatars of the contemporary global self.
The September 2015 issue of British Elle and several other fashion magazines carried a pull-out advertisement for Ralph Lauren's Autumn/Winter 2015 collection. Shot by the celebrated British photographer Jimmy Nelson on location in Finnish Lapland, the sequence of images featured a northern-European-looking blonde woman (the Dutch model Sanne Vloet) dressed in a variety of luxurious furry garments and ethnic-style jewellery, accompanied by Siberian huskies and juxtaposed with pictures of reindeer. In one particularly striking, wide
, impervious, protected with impunity through social status. Just as there are multiple classes, castes, races and ethnicities, there are varieties of classic monsters. Thus, accompanying this elevated vampiric renaissance has been the werewolf, taking a subordinate place usually, like a familiar or loyal canine accompanying a more elegant master. Rather than being the privileged, evening-clothed, public-school creature of the night, the werewolf is undistinguished, lower-class, often relegated to the equivalent of a kennel rather than a castle
defiance, the work of the unnamed illustrator of the Vizetelly edition – likely its publisher Henry Vizetelly himself 8 – occupies an important place in the history of modern visual and literary depictions of Egyptian mummies and the sociopolitical discourses that they voiced. The Vizetelly illustration also embellishes Poe's vision, invoking contemporary racial theories about the ethnic identities of ancient Egyptians. An artist must necessarily reference the tone of a subject's skin, where a writer might leave such
-century colonial project. However, a number of recent studies have observed that the Nordic nations were in fact active participants in various colonial projects inside and outside the nation's borders. As argued by Keskinen et al in Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region ( 2009 ): [N]orth-European countries have taken, and continue to take, part in (post)colonial processes. The lure of an enterprise as powerful and authoritative as the Western civilising project, attracts
background, sometimes transformed into something else, sometimes appearing in their original shape as hauntings from the past. Nordic Gothic deals with texts that relate to the Gothic in different ways; while some can be defined as typically Gothic, others are better described as inspired by the genre or examples of hybrid combinations of genres. Regarding ‘Nordic’, it should be observed that this concept has changed substantially over the centuries, as nations, languages, cultures and ethnicities have transformed it and been transformed within it
needs to be emphasised that the folkhem has not been for everyone and it is therefore a legitimate question as to whether it has ever really existed. Ethnic minorities such as Romani and Sámi have often been excluded, as well as other marginalised groups. In the following analysis the folkhem concept should thus be understood as a nostalgic idea of an era, usually regarded as beginning in the 1930s and ending during the 1970s when the long reign of the Social Democrats was over. The 1980s was a period of increasing neo-liberalism and financial speculation. In 1985
, you are nothing’. The screenplay writer Steve Knight recalls, ‘I thought the idea of a human heart in the toilet would be emblematic of the fact that a lot of people with talent who happen to migrate are wasted – their humanity is thrown away’. 76 Citizenship does not neutralise these asymmetries. Juliette, a Black British citizen, is triply marginalised due to her ethnicity, her class position, and her role as a sex worker. As she says, ‘I don’t exist, do I?’ As in the texts I discussed in Chapter 2 , these economic and social precarities are expressed