Millennial Capitalism’s Vampires: The South African Graphic Novel Rebirth

In the postcolonial South African graphic novel Rebirth, the workings of capital are established in the figure of the vampire. But the comic is not derivative; it does not simply offer another instantiation of the monstrous lord draining his victimized serfs of their life source – or, in the case of the postcolonial narrative, the colonial patriarch parasitically feasting off of the colonizers’ land and culture. Rebirth does effectively and importantly employ the vampire figure to draw a line from the violently exploitative commercial interests of seventeenth-century charter companies to that of current-day corporate power, which dominates through consumer culture. Intriguingly, though, the graphic novel also features a class of vampires that has only recently begun to be explored, vampires that are victimized and endangered – made mortal through an immune deficiency virus – even as they remain inherently predatory and dangerous. We argue that a distribution of vampires across class, race and gender types illustrates ‘millennial capitalism’ as it has been defined by Jean and John Comaroff – an entangling variation that may only be confronted from a place of complicity. The comic style draws the reader into that complicity as much as the comic's characters exhibit it.