Chapter 3 - Afropessimism, Queer Negativity, and the Limits of Romanticism

Summary

While the Romantic vampire has often been read as disrupting heteropatriarchal norms, in reading Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre, Deanna Koretsky exposes how the supposedly liberatory figure of the vampire upholds the antiblackness at the heart of the Gothic tradition. Koretsky sharply and counterintuitively argues that there is in fact nothing more representative of the human than the figure of the vampire and that D’arcy’s black vampire thus threatens the modern sociopolitical order built on expelling blackness from the category of the human.