Disinterring, Entanglements, and the Undead in The Black Vampyre (1819)
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I situate Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo (1819) at the intersection of a transatlantic capitalist network and the evolving literary tradition of Anglophone Caribbean writing. Conceivably a fraught counterpart to Polidori’s The Vampyre, D’Arcy’s novella is entangled in the economic, political, and cultural circuits of the long eighteenth century. In examining its layered engagement with the Transatlantic world, I argue that the universe D’Arcy conjures is haunted by an extractive economy—one fundamentally sustained by the enslavement and extortion of people of African descent, particularly within the violent geographies of the plantation. His portrayal of a vampire of color acts as a deliberate disinterment of colonial guilt—a guilt borne not only by transatlantic observers but also, more directly, by plantation owners. By fusing the vampire figure with the brutalities of slavery, D’Arcy foregrounds how both colonists and the enslaved are caught in a haunted economy of the living undead, within and beyond the Caribbean.
Abstract
I situate Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo (1819) at the intersection of a transatlantic capitalist network and the evolving literary tradition of Anglophone Caribbean writing. Conceivably a fraught counterpart to Polidori’s The Vampyre, D’Arcy’s novella is entangled in the economic, political, and cultural circuits of the long eighteenth century. In examining its layered engagement with the Transatlantic world, I argue that the universe D’Arcy conjures is haunted by an extractive economy—one fundamentally sustained by the enslavement and extortion of people of African descent, particularly within the violent geographies of the plantation. His portrayal of a vampire of color acts as a deliberate disinterment of colonial guilt—a guilt borne not only by transatlantic observers but also, more directly, by plantation owners. By fusing the vampire figure with the brutalities of slavery, D’Arcy foregrounds how both colonists and the enslaved are caught in a haunted economy of the living undead, within and beyond the Caribbean.