A big part of postcolonial criticism is colonialist ideology.  It emphasizes the superiority of European colonizers while othering the colonized (Tyson 400-401).  It’s a way to justify the colonization, and the subsequent cruelty, enacted by the colonizers.  To keep this myth alive, they taught colonialist ideology to the conquered people. This leads to a desire to assimilate from the colonized, who practice mimicry (Tyson 403), imitating the ways and culture of their conquerors out of shame and a desire for acceptance.  By othering the colonized, the colonizers also refuse to address their own vulnerability to conquest. Only “others” are weak enough to be conquered by a great nation like ours, they say. We are too strong and powerful. We’re immune because we’re superior, and we’re superior because we’re immune.  

But what happens when the colonizers are doing the mimicry to insert themselves among their victims?  And what happens when the colonized and the colonizer are on the same continent? Most literature about colonialism (encouraging or condemning) doesn’t explore these sticky spots.  

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been called an allegory for colonization, but it pushes the traditional colonization narrative.  The titular vampire emigrates from Transylvania to England in an attempt to start a vampire empire there, like a colonizer.  When he travels, he brings coffins of soil from his home country because as a vampire, he’s unable to sleep on any other dirt than his own.  This calls to mind immigrants (or colonists) bringing aspects of their culture to the places they settle in to establish a cultural foothold.  On the flip side, Dracula works hard to pass as British. He asks protagonist Jonathan Harker to stay with him so Dracula can study and imitate the Englishman’s pronunciation, syntax, accent, diction, and speech patterns.  This is much more insidious than overt colonization, where the colonizers make no effort to assimilate. Dracula pretends to be a fully English human while secretly planting the seeds for a Transylvanian vampire colony to conquer the English humans.  It throws a wrench in traditional colonialism narratives because we have one European country attempting to colonize another European country, instead of a European country attempting to colonize a nonEuropean country. Also, the colonizer is thwarted.  I see the novel as both a colonialist narrative, suggesting the superiority of England since it resists being colonized (the immunity-superiority loop I mentioned above), and an anti-colonialist narrative, showing the limits of European colonizing power.  It’s also anti-colonialist by making the colonizer the other: the would-be-colonized English are members of the “superior” race while the colonizers are blood-sucking, inhuman villains. It’s a fitting, and condemning, metaphor for colonization, which drains labor, life, and resources from the colonized.  

Works Cited

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015.