🖋 A Multiculturalism of the Undead〈Matthew Wills〉

Title: A Multiculturalism of the Undead
Author: Matthew Wills
URL: https://daily.jstor.org/a-multiculturalism-of-the-undead/
Date: 2025-09-16
License: You may display and print for your personal, non-commercial use portions of content from JSTOR Daily. You may not otherwise alter or use any of the content without ITHAKA’s prior written consent…

Labeling the undead figures in non-European mythology, popular culture, and academia as “vampires” doesn’t make sense.

For not all of the world’s legions of undead are nocturnal blood-predators with fangs. Andrew Hock Soon Ng argues that vampire-universalism, particularly prevalent now on the internet, is very much misplaced. “Non-Western undead embodiments, particularly from Asia, cannot be classified as vampires,” he writes. In fact, “subsuming non-Western undead creatures under the vampire as a category expresses more than just an Orientalist assertion; it is also a denial of the vampire’s singularity and the unique circumstances determining it.”

In a topology of such supernatural figures, the Euro-vampire should be put into a “comparative cross-cultural analysis between undead entities from different parts of the world.” From Asia, other such beings include the Indian baital, the Chines jiangshi, the Japanese bakeneko, the Indonesian pontianak, and the Philippine aswang.

This post inspired several research questions:

How exactly Enlightenment science & rationality affected the development of vampire representation in literature?
In which proportion count Dracula was inspired by Vlad III of Wallachia vs historical context of Victorian Britain?
How Asian undead were made more European & vampire-like by translators of works in which these “vampires” have appeared? Did these changes affect the perception of undead in their countries of origin?
Which European undead were “vampirified”?