Ken Gelder

The Subcultures Reader

Introduction I. Sub-Societies and the Sociological Tradition II. Youth Sub-Cultures III. Contesting the Subcultural Terrain IV. Ethics and Ethnography V. Historical Studies VI. Spatial Organisations and Territorial Identities VII. Sounds, Styles, and Embodied Politics VIII. Mediated, Commercial and Virtual Subcultures Bibliography

New vampire cinema

Acknowledgements Preface Inauthentic Vampires Bram Stokers Dracula, Shadow of the Vampire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Interview with the Vampire, and Queen of the Damned Our Vampires, Our Neighbours Frostbitten, Let the Right One In, Let Me In, Night Watch, and Day Watch Citational Vampires Irma Vep, Vampire Hunter D: Blood Lust, Blood: The Last Vampire, and Thirst Vampires in the Americas Nadja, The Addiction, Habit, and Vampire in Brooklyn Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse Cronos the From Dusk Till Dawn trilogy and the John Carpenters Vampires Trilogy Diminishing Vampires The Blade trilogy the Underworld trilogy Ultraviolet, The Breed, Perfect Creature and Daybreakers Bibliography Index

The Postcolonial Ghost Story

Let us begin by noting that Australia’s postcolonial condition is for the most part a consequence of claims made upon it — land claims, compensation claims, and so on — by its Aboriginal people.* It would be possible to describe Aboriginal people at this point in Australia’s modern history as charismatic, in their capacity to mobilize forces much larger than their ‘minority’ status would suggest. When a claim is made on a sacred site, this feature is especially apparent: a government can look forward to losing millions of dollars through legal procedures that invariably bring together a ‘smorgasbord’ (as one newspaper described it) of interest groups over a protracted period of time. In this climate, Aborigines certainly continue to receive sympathy for what they do not have — good health, adequate housing, and so on — and yet at the same time they draw resentment from white Australians because they seem to be claiming more than their ‘fair share’. We have elsewhere described this double-headed view of Aborigines as ‘postcolonial racism’ — a form of racism which sees Aborigines as lacking on the one hand, and yet appearing on the other hand to have too much: too much land, too much national attention, too much ‘effect’.1 It is surely a strange irony to hear white Australians these days — including some maverick Federal politicians — describing Aborigines as more franchised, more favoured, than they are.

When the Imaginary Australian is Not Uncanny: Nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian Cultural Criticism and History

Postcolonialism does not exists outside the shadow of colonialism and even as Australia remains under the shadow of colonialism, it is postcolonial because it does things that could not have been done if Australia were still just colonial. Postcolonialism in Australia means more Aboriginal presence, but for non-Aboriginal Australians, less Aboriginal contact and so the emphasis on one to one relationships is important, especially in a postcolonial context that conceptualises and officialises contact primarily in pedagogical terms.

Southern Vampires: Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris and True Blood

This chapter reads two contemporary Southern American vampire novelists—Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris—in the framework of legacies of slavery, plantations and the Civil War. In Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), Louis is a French plantation owner in Louisiana in 1791 and part of what Barbara Eckstein calls the ‘colonial foundations of New Orleans’. Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–2012), however, take Southern whiteness for granted as the privileged, property-inheriting signifier. The True Blood series (2008–2014) challenges this vision by radically changing the characters of Lafayette and, in particular, Tara—a pathologised register of racial discrimination. Rice’s novel, Harris’s mysteries and the True Blood television series all, in different ways, make recent ‘post-racial’ accounts of the United States difficult to sustain.

The Fields of Popular Fiction

Popular fiction is an immense but nonetheless distinctive literary field and, rather like literary fiction—to which it is often contrasted—it has its representative authors, those who seem to encapsulate everything that gives that field definition. The American writer James Patterson is a good contemporary example. Patterson has published around 100 novels since 1976: high, regular output in a popular genre (detective fiction, for example) is one measurement of this particular field’s good health. It also helps if an author sells a lot of copies, assisted by some aggressive and effective publicity and distribution; something that has in fact been a feature of the popular fictional field for some considerable time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Patterson is also an experienced and successful advertising executive ‘who knows a thing or two about branding’ (Wood 2009). Literary fiction can sometimes sell very well indeed, of course, but popular fiction can lay immediate claim to large chunks of the fictional marketplace. ‘Of all the hardcover fiction sold in the U.S. in 2013,’ an article in Vanity Fair tells us, ‘books by Patterson accounted for one out of every 26.’ This article goes on to speak of a ‘global thriller industry’ and characterises Patterson as ‘the Henry Ford of books’ (Purdum 2015). The New York Times Magazine similarly notes that since 2006 ‘one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson’; it calls him ‘James Patterson Inc.’ as if, in the world of popular fiction, author and company can seem to be one and the same thing (Mahler 2010). Literary fiction, by contrast, is rarely if ever regarded as a matter of industrial or corporate production.

Colonial Australian Detectives, Character Type and the Colonial Economy

Crime fiction started early in Australia, emerging out of the experiences of transportation and the convict system at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first Australian (that is, locally published) novel is generally agreed to be Quintus Servinton (1832), written by Henry Savery, a convicted forger who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1825 and—convicted once more of forging financial documents—died as a prisoner in Port Arthur in 1842. Quintus Servinton is a kind of semi-autobiographical fantasy that imagines its entrepreneurial protagonist’s redemption: surviving his conviction and jail sentence in order to return to England with his beloved wife. We can note here that it does four important things in terms of the future of crime narratives in Australia. Firstly, it presents colonial Australia as a place already defined by an apparatus of policing, legal systems and governance, where ‘justice’ can at least potentially work to restore an individual’s status and liberty: for example, through convict emancipation. Secondly, it insists that the experience of incarceration and punishment is crucial to that character’s reintegration into respectable life: ‘the stains that had marked him’, we are told, ‘were removed by the discipline he had been made to endure’ (Savery, vol. 3, ch. XIII, n.p.). Thirdly, the novel ties the colonial economy to financial investment and growth on the one hand, and fraud or forgery on the other. These apparent opposites are folded together at the moment of settlement to the extent that the phrase ‘forging the colonial economy’ is a kind of potent double entendre. Prominent transported forgers included the colonial artists Thomas Whatling (transported 1791), Joseph Lycett (transported 1814), Thomas Wainewright (transported 1837) and of course Henry Savery himself. In Savery’s novel, Quintus Servinton is ‘thunderstruck’ when someone explains the conventional distinction between legitimate financial deals and forgeries: ‘You surely do not mean, Sir, it can be a forgery, to issue paper bearing the names of persons who never existed….If that be the case…many commercial men innocently issue forgeries every day of their lives’ (vol. 1, ch. III, n.p.). This takes us to the fourth point: that crime fiction in Australia is also about imposture, where characters do indeed adopt ‘the names of persons who never existed’. The mutability of colonial characters—the question of how real (authentic) or fictional (fraudulent) they might be, and the impacts this has socially and fiscally on the colonial scene—soon becomes a tremendous problem for emergent systems of policing and governance in Australia. As Janet C. Myers notes, ‘the linkage between emigration and crime forged through convict transportation continued to evoke anxieties….The atmosphere in which such anxieties were nurtured was one of rapid social mobility and shifting identities in the Antipodes’ (2009, p. 83).

Towards a Genealogy of Minor Colonial Australian Character Types

The business of colonization is often understood in terms of global frameworks, large-scale movements and top-down, ‘abstract’ perspectives; in which case, the turn to minor characters in the colonized world might seem almost like an act of bad faith. It runs the risk of breaking open stable, overarching categories, like the ‘white man’ – which, as minor characters are introduced, sometimes struggles to retain its ascendancy. This essay pursues the idea of minor settler types in colonial Australia as points of departure or differentiation from the macro-narratives of colonial discourse. Sometimes they do consolidate into something dominant, but they can also disassemble into peripheral identities that the nation might continue to invest in or want to leave behind, depending on the case. The narratives they inhabit are therefore especially important, throwing types together, leading them in different, sometimes contradictory, directions, juxtaposing them with one another. This essay will look at colonial investments in a range of major and minor character types, including the Coming Australian, the rouseabout, the Melbourne dandy, the ‘night auctioneer’, the Sydney pieman and the ‘inspector of nuisances’. It introduces a Sydney-based magazine called Heads of the People (1847–8), which immediately raised – and did not resolve – the problem of who is central and who is peripheral to the colonial economy. The magazine self-consciously drew minor character types back into public life, recognizing that colonial literature – like the colonial economy itself – was continually assembled, and disassembled, by the narratives these figures inhabited.

Explorations in Industry

Domestic and industrial employment for women became an increasingly visible issue in Australian newspapers and journals in the years immediately following Federation: when women gained the vote both nationally and at state level, with Victoria the last state to fall in line in 1908. This chapter examines some of the anxieties that attended this issue, to do with protecting women’s well-being in employment in terms of salary and working conditions, cultivating appropriate social worlds through which women could safely circulate, and building their character-formation into the future of the nation. A key debate here is to do with what labour contributed to women’s independence. Does employment for women take them away from the family, or help them — ultimately — to return and contribute to it? How does women’s labour help young women especially to transition from girlhood to adult life? And, more interestingly for us, what is the interplay during this time between women’s employment experiences and the romantic and matrimonial possibilities that were consequently available to them? Two kinds of distinctions are typically drawn. The first is between employment as a matter of women’s training for the future, and employment as something much more rudimentary, a form of servitude or enslavement that can seem anachronistic or regressive in the framework of a modern, post-Federated nation.1

Citational Vampires: Transnational Techniques of Circulation in Irma Vep, Blood: The Last Vampire and Thirst

One of the problems to do with viewing and analysing cinema from remote locations is to do with the matter of getting to what Meaghan Morris has called the ‘local levels of language community and affective mobilisation’ (2005, p. 7). Naturally, there is always a sense that cinema from other places — cinema that is no doubt best understood through its local frameworks of production and consumption, its local traditions and so on — will always exceed the understanding of critics who remain geographically and culturally distanced from these things. This is exactly my own predicament here, as an Anglo-Australian viewer who is trying to read some fascinating vampire films from France, Japan and Korea. On the other hand, these films are also already transnational, designed among other things to interrogate one’s assumptions about cultural and geographical distance, and difference. They are both ‘local’ and something else besides; to this end, they place the ‘local’ and the remote into proximity with each other, juxtaposing them but also drawing them together. In fact, the films under discussion here stage an encounter between these two otherwise distinct domains: turning the remote viewer’s experience of this into, effectively, an encounter with an encounter.