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Record W4225630703 · doi:10.1093/jvcult/vcac017

Meta-Dracula: Contagion and the Colonial Gothic

2022· article· en· W4225630703 on OpenAlex
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Victorian Culture · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGothic Literature and Media Analysis
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDraculaVampireColonialismAllegoryEmpireHistoryIdeologyLiteraturePoliticsAestheticsSociologyLawArtArt historyPolitical scienceAncient history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This essay, excerpted with permission from my recent book Epidemic Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is about the colonial Gothic and the appearance therein of the paradigm of contagion as a metonym for political violence. I show how Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the most enduring and popular novel in this archive, is so capacious in its allegorical accommodations that it has been read as incorporating nearly every threat and monster of its own time and place, as well as those of its scenes of critical reception. More than indexing historical referents, I argue, the novel is a kind of allegory of allegories, producing new epistemes about multisystemic threats and carrying them forward into the crises of our own moment – global pandemic, terrorism, the collapse of empires. Following Fanon, who invokes the rich mythology of the vampire to point out colonial discourse’s specific habits of dehumanization, we can locate Dracula in an important archive of colonial writing that sets the ‘science’ of monsters on its infinite course and advances a reading practice that borrows from the surveillance apparatus and epidemic narrative strategies of colonial disease literature. Because of its extraordinary durability, Dracula is a crucial textual conduit in the transmission of minor ideas about the circulation of terror, rebellion, racialized bodies, foreign materials, and communicable disease from largely forgotten nineteenth-century texts and contexts into the common sense of late empire and late capitalism. Although Dracula is not a terribly self-conscious, systematically researched, or ideologically consistent text, it is decisive in its effects.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.931
Threshold uncertainty score0.659

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.285
Teacher spread0.264 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it