“There Existed an Addiction to Blood”: Exhuming the Transtemporal Body

Abstract:In light of burgeoning mainstream and commercial interest in black horror, futurism, and surrealism in recent film and television, this article sets out to redress the relegation of the black vampire to the shadows of culture, both to illume its aesthetic and narrative innovations and to address the radical alterity and political potency of its speculative mythology with regard to time and the body. I approach the undead black body as a rhizomatic through line that collapses axiomatic temporal dimensions of past, present, and future into a coexistent, thickened, layered moment, and thus simultaneously reflects revisionist, alternate, and anticipatory modes of imagining resistant and revolutionary possibilities. Found lurking throughout black creative production, the black vampire offers a transmedial line of flight, a revolutionary revision of dominant practice that augments the black body, so consistently deprived of life throughout history and art, with immortality and a timeless point of view.