Speaking with Vampires : Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Luise White : book review

Abstract

Extracted from text ... 241 BOOK REVIEWS Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. By Luise White. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2000. 352 pp. ISBN 05 20217 047. 'I call this transnational genre of African stories vampire stories, not because I want to insert a lively African oral genre into a European one, but because I want to use a widespread term that adequately conveys the mobility, the internationalism and the economics of these colonial bloodsuckers. No other term depicts the ease with which blood sucking beings cross boundaries, violate space, capture vulnerable men and women, and extract precious bodily fluid ..