Speaking with vampires Book

Luise White takes on the herculean task of legitimizing oral tradition and record as cultural and social history, but not from the standard European schema of colonial extraction. She utilizes the rubric of African vampire stories to contextualize the ways in which rumor articulates shared experience in colonial Africa. For White, these stories are not folklore, but social records she wishes to substantiate into a historical frame by taking them, "at face value, as everyday descriptions of extraordinary occurrences" (5). White chooses this particular idiom as a way of speaking in socially constructed terms about the experience of the colonized. Her analysis focuses on the repeated details of, "firemen and equipment and anemia, so that they might be used as a primary source from which to write, and sometimes rewrite, the history of colonial East and Central Africa" (4).
White organizes her book in three parts. The first is the theoretical basis by which her work should be approached. She is fastidious in outlining her methodology. She is dealing with sources that report things that never happened through the mouths of those who did not experience them, "looking not so much for the reasons behind make-believe as for what such beliefs articulate in a given time and place"(44). The rest of her book is the analysis of these oral traditions in specific time and region from the African vantage, extrapolating meaning from the existing predisposition of Africans towards technology, medicine, gender and labor. In the second part these constructs are leveraged to articulate fear of change and in the third to show how vampire stories tell colonial history. Throughout the book White repeatedly reminds her readership to think in terms of genre, not in terms of individual or performance. The individual voice is not important, the cultural memory being transmitted in the repeated details is; White "privileg[es] words and images over voices" (113).

With the exception of the first chapter, this book is a revised collection of previously published essays. It would seem impossible to know where to being to write a book with such breadth of comparative analysis without an expert grasp of the enormous historiography that these individual essays, written over the course of a decade, lend to the whole. The historiography on gender, medicine, philology, and colonialism White has at her fingertips is dizzying. That she is able to leverage this expansive expertise to legitimize vampire stories, hearsay, as historical inquiry is admirable, if not fully realized. She argues," that vampire stories offer a better, clearer, more analytical picture of the colonial experience than other sources do" (307), but without the myriad of other sources that she utilizes in conjunction to create that picture, they would be impossible to assess and even with historiography at her disposal, she makes some very large leaps in analysis. In "A Special Danger" she relates the stories of three women discussing prostitution in the 1940's, a time when there were no clocks in colonial Africa, yet each story includes a specific time detail. White suggests this is indicative of gender and body issues, exhibiting the idea of "women's time-disciplined blood" through its desirability to the wazimamoto. That the asocial aspects of menstruation can be further extrapolated from these details is ludicrous. She does not look at these time details as being indicative of changes between the 1940's and the mid 1970's, when the stories are set, and when they are related to her, respectively. The type of analysis that would be in keeping with the methodology she is trying to establish.

White also falls short in her repeated, intrusive insertion of first person narrative. In several sections it is difficult to immerse oneself in her analysis without her popping up, not to provide guidance or reassert her theoretical framework, but with the regular interruption of what "this chapter" is about, without giving her audience the opportunity to assess her argument in whole. It pulls you out of main narrative to take part in one that is wholly unnecessary at the time and leaves one with the impression that she either doesn't trust she is making her argument or that her readership is capable of assessing it without her guidance. Or perhaps it is simply that she lacks confidence in her methodology. She invokes Carlo Ginzburg's work in Night Battles to draw parallels between the changes in the meaning of words that occur between interviewer and interviewee over time, but does not draw this comparison in any substantial way into the body of her book. It lies in the introduction, as if conjuring Ginzburg's authority will lend legitimacy to her. Given that her argument is open ended by design, rumor can neither be proved nor disproved, and there are endless possibilities to the interpretation of rumor, it is difficult to grasp the validity of White's analysis. And that may be the point. The analysis is simply there to reinforce her founding of a new methodological theory. She is convincing in the construction of the theoretic scaffolding by which rumor can be analyzed, but the evidence and analysis portions of her work vary so greatly that it is often difficult to assess it as a whole. What she produces, ultimately, is a manual for how to approach rumor as a genre and articulate it into historical discourse.