"Luise White is as usual stimulating and provocative. This book on vampires reverses strong mythologies and will make a significant difference in African studies."--Valentin Mudimbe, author of The Idea of Africa

"A brilliant, eccentric, original book. It is deeply researched, intellectually engaged, and morally serious. It deserves a wide readership." --Thomas Laqueur, author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets.

In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction.

White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history.

About the Author
Luise White is Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida. Her previous book, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990), won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association.

Read Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa Online

FREE, HTML Online Edition.

Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 9, 2000)
Author: Luise White
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520217047
ISBN-13: 978-0520217041

"It took courage, determination, and a clear mind to make us see unexpected aspects of colonial history, not beneath, but through, stories of bloodsuckers and cannibals. Luise White's book convincingly demonstrates that these tales of the fantastic can be sources of history-writing, giving us access to realities that are ignored by those who uncritically accept the injunctions of scientific realism."--Johannes Fabian, author of Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire

CONTENTS:
Acknowledgments
A Note on Currencies and Talk
Part One
1. Blood and Words
2. Historicizing Rumor and Gossip
Part Two
3. “Bandages on Your Mouth”
4. “Why Is Petrol Red?”
Part Three
5. “A Special Danger”
6. “Roast Mutton Captivity”
7. Blood, Bugs, and Archives
8. Citizenship and Censorship
9. Class Struggle and Cannibalism
10. Conclusions
Bibliography
Credits

Credits

The following chapters are revised versions of materials published elsewhere:

Chapter 2: “Between Gluckman and Foucault: Historicizing Rumor and Gossip,” Social Dynamics 20, no. 1 (1994): 75–92. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter 3: “‘They Could Make Their Victims Dull’: Genders and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Colonial Southern Uganda,” American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (1995): 1–1402. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter 4: “Cars out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and Central Africa,” Representations 43 (1993): 27–50. Also in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Societies in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 436–60. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter 5: “Bodily Fluids and Usufruct: Controlling Property in Nairobi, 1919–1939,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 24, no. 3 (1990): 418–38. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter 6: “Vampire Priests of Central Africa. Or, African Debates about Labor and Religion in Colonial Northern Zambia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 4 (1993): 744–70. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter 7: “Tsetse Visions: Narratives of Blood and Bugs in Colonial Northern Zambia, 1931–37,” Journal of African History 36, no. 2 (1995): 219–45. Reprinted by permission.

Chapter 8: “‘Firemen Do Not Buy People: Media, Villains, and Vampires in Kampala in the 1950s,” Passages 8 (September 1994): 11, 16–17. Reprinted by permission.

Comments (1)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment