Vampires: Pandemics & Politics

In this episode, Timothy Wright discusses the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), which reimagines the aristocratic European vampire in the striated and gritty space of Johannesburg. These vampires, terminally ill with a blood-borne disease resembling HIV, offer a surprising generative vantage point from which to think through some urgent social and political issues of the contemporary moment: whiteness, entanglement, transformation, blood imaginaries, and, finally, the global politics of immunity and insulation around the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Timothy Wright is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara and a former post-doctoral fellow at WISER who is spending his sabbatical at the Institute.

The WiSER Podcast Team this year is convened by Sarah Nuttall, sound editing by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and designs by Bronwyn Kotzen.