Bram Stoker’s Sources: Extraction Culture and the Circuits of Knowledge Production

In 1819, the Melaka-based missionary periodical The Indo-Chinese Gleaner published the first English-language account of the penanggalan based on a description given by the writer and teacher of languages, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1796-1854). Abdullah’s rendition of this vampiric creature proved generative for Western reading audiences, and its mythology circulated through missionary print and colonial anthropological networks before appearing in Bram Stoker’s preparatory notes for Dracula (1897). Taking this as a case study, this talk reconstructs circuits of colonial knowledge production, asking how Southeast Asian materials moved through imperial infrastructures and were transformed, reattributed or absorbed into Victorian fiction. I propose that the method of “citation chaining” allows us to see how nineteenth-century “world literature” was not simply shaped by global exchange, but actively constituted through the extraction of knowledge from colonial archives in ways that worked to diminish and sideline local voices.

Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Massachusetts and Jane E. Ruby Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic and Victorian literature and culture, with interests in the novel, imperialism, religion and secularization, as well as cosmopolitanism and postcolonial theory. Her first book, Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, was published with Ohio State University Press in 2020. She is currently working on a project titled Spreading the Word, Shaping the World: Foreign Missionary Presses and the Rise of Nineteenth-Century World Literature.