Vampire Nation

Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing the serbs as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural imaginaries and rhetorical mechanisms that inform nationalist discourses more broadly. Tomislav Z. Longinovi points to the Gothic associations of violence, blood, and soil in the writings of many intellectuals and politicians during the 1990s, especially in portrayals by the U.S.-led Western media of the serbs as a vampire nation, a bloodsucking parasite on the edge of European civilization.Interpreting oral and written narratives and visual culture, Longinovi traces the early modern invention of the serbs and the categorys twentieth-century transformations. He describes the influence of Bram Stokers nineteenth-century novel Dracula on perceptions of the Balkan region and reflects on representations of hybrid identities and their violent destruction in the works of the regions most prominent twentieth-century writers. Concluding on a hopeful note, Longinovi considers efforts to imagine a new collective identity in non-nationalist terms. These endeavors include the emigrant Yugoslav writer David Albaharis Canadian Trilogy and Cyber-Yugoslavia, a mock nation-state with citizens in more than thirty countries.