Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (The Cultures and Practice of Violence)
Price 20.66 - 22.95 USD
Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing âthe serbsâ as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural imaginaries and rhetorical mechanisms that inform nationalist discourses more broadly. Tomislav Z. Longinovic points to the Gothic associations of violence, blood, and soil in the writings of many intellectuals and politicians during the 1990s, especially in portrayals by the U.S.-led Western media of âthe serbsâ as a vampire nation, a bloodsucking parasite on the edge of European civilization. Interpreting oral and written narratives and visual culture, Longinovic traces the early modern invention of âthe serbsâ and the categoryâs twentieth-century transformations. He describes the influence of Bram Stokerâs nineteenth-century novel Dracula on perceptions of the Balkan region, and reflects on representations of hybrid identities and their violent destruction in the works of the regionâs most prominent twentieth-century writers. Concluding on a hopeful note, Longinovic considers efforts to imagine a new collective identity in non-nationalist terms. These endeavors include the emigrant Yugoslav writer David Albahariâs Canadian Trilogy and Cyber Yugoslavia, a mock nation-state with âcitizensâ in more than thirty countries.