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Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras: Estudos Literários
Seminário de literatura inglesa e/ou outras literaturas: Deslocamentos e relocações: pós-
colonialismo, diáspora e exílio.
Professora Eliana Lourenço
Fernanda Carvalho
19/02/2008

Concepts of Mobility in Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned

1. Introduction

In the contemporary world scenario marked by globalization, discussions about concepts of

mobility have been important for the understanding of the life conditions of human beings. Many

scholars recognize that such concepts have been present in human history since ancient times,

shaping the ways people classify modes of life among others. In mythology, folklore, and fiction,

the lives of supernatural characters are usually presented as metaphors for alternative (often

transgressive) ways of life on earth. In this sense, vampire stories can be seen as representing a kind

of alternative existence based on the disregard for natural and social laws: a life as an immortal

creature, who feeds upon other living beings and who can act freely for being immune to the

constrains and punishments of social morality. If we consider that such transgressive way of life

represents issues that are prohibited in the conventional ways, the analysis of vampire stories may

reveal questions that are present in the public discussions about the conditions of human life. In this

paper, I intend to put together these two tools for interpreting human life, theories of mobility and

vampire fiction. In order to do so, I am going to apply concepts of mobility to the stories of vampire

characters in Anne Rice’s novel The Queen of the Damned. Indeed, the characterization of the

condition of supernatural beings is not a direct concern of theories that discuss concepts of mobility;

neither can the representation of situations of mobility be considered the central point in Rice’s

novel. Nevertheless, I believe that, by spotlighting and relating these apparently irrelevant aspects,

my work can confirm the presence of concepts of mobility in the Western literary production,
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contributing, thus, to the argument that mobility is a fundamental factor to the description and

representation of social relationships in human life.

This argument is defended by Peters, who asserts that concepts of mobility are central to the

Western thought and tradition, being present in historical narratives of many groups of people and

related to the perception of otherness (17). According to him, “movement is one of the central

resources for social description,” in a way that wandering has an “enduring metaphorical power …

in the fantasy life and social repertory of the West” (18). Peters argues that concepts of mobility

have not been exactingly defined, as their use is widespread and applied to different cases, but they

can be better understood through stories of human movement that compose the Western tradition

(the biblical story of the Exodus, the historical journeys of domination and displacement, for

instance). I believe that the story created by Rice, though it is not a literary cannon (it is rather a

product of pop culture), also uses concepts of mobility, in that the author follows a whole Western

narrative tradition about dislocations and relocations.

Concerning the vampires, there is also a tradition in the characterization of these creatures in

myths and in fiction that uses concepts of mobility. Vampires are traditionally represented as

creatures who posses particular movement abilities. These may include the ability to fly, to levitate,

to walk on walls, fast speed, telepathy, and teletransportation (Konstantinos 7-9). The vampire’s

immortality can also be related to mobility, as it implies a great capacity of movement throughout

time. All these abilities suggest that vampires are creatures who can experience movement in a

larger array of possibilities than humans. For this reason, they can be considered powerful

metaphors for representing real-life experiences of mobility.

In The Queen of the Damned, Rice portrays the vampires through the point a view of one of

them, the two-hundred years old Lestat. He becomes a rock singer in order to fulfill both his desires

of being worshiped by humans and of revealing to them the existence of vampires. But his music

awakes Akasha, the mother and queen of vampires, who has terrible plans for the future of

humanity. Lestat narrates his story depicting the vampire existence as separated from that of human
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beings. He, like all the vampires, resembles the humans in appearance only slightly, but that is

enough to enable the vampires to use their immortality to keep in permanent observation of human

progress on earth. The novel presents the struggles of Lestat and of other vampires to understand

both human and vampire life. The feelings of anguish and loneliness that assaults Rice’s vampires

in this novel is due mainly to the impossibility of living normally among the human beings, and this

is the main point that permits the application of concepts of mobility to this novel: the vampires’

condition as displaced creatures, as outsiders. The concepts I am going to discuss and apply to the

The Queen of the Damned are the ones of diaspora, exile, nomadism, border crossing, and

cosmopolitanism. I am going to argue that these concepts apply to Rice’s vampires in two levels.

The first one is the level of human life, in which the vampire is dislocated for not being human

anymore. The second is the level more specifically geographic, which is related to the places that

the vampires inhabited before being vampirized, and to those that they inhabit during their vampiric

existence.

2. Diaspora

According to Peters, diaspora “suggests real or imagined relationships among scattered

fellows, whose sense of community is sustained by forms of communication and contact such as

kinship, pilgrimage, trade, travel, and shared culture” (20). The widespread use of this concept is,

however, recognizably problematic, as it raises doubts about the delimitation of cases to which it

applies. In order to discuss diaspora in The Queen of the Damned, I am going to start by using the

features suggest by Cohen (1999) for the identification of diasporic communities. Among them, the

one about the “[d]ispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two or more foreign

regions” (Cohen 274) can be related to Rice’s vampires to the extent that these creatures were taken

out of the place of human existence and of their geographical places through the traumatic event of

vampirization, and they now live scattered around the world. Other features of diaspora that apply

to the vampires’ case is “[a] collective memory and myth about the homeland, including its
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location, history and achievements,” and “[a] strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a

long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history and the belief in a common

fate” (Cohen 274). In The Queen of the Damned, the vampires are conscious of the existence of

others of their kind in all parts of the world and consider themselves a kind of ethnic community

that lives among the humans disguised. Rice created a whole mythology for her vampires that

explain their origin and their conditions. The truth about this myth is revealed only at the end of the

novel, but, like the myths in real life, the main points are known by all the vampires throughout the

world, some details being added and varying according to different times and places. In general, all

the vampires know that they descend from the king and queen of a six thousand years old

civilization, from which the ancient Egyptians descended. The two of them are still alive, sleeping

under the form of statues, and on their safety depends the lives of all the vampires, for all are

connected by the same blood. This knowledge imposes on the vampires throughout the world a set

of codes that must be respected in order to guarantee their existence on earth. The main one is that

they must live in shadows, disguised, without revealing their real identity to humans. Another

feature of diaspora can be related to Rice’s vampires: “[a]n idealization of the putative ancestral

home and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, safety and prosperity, even to its

creation” (Cohen 274). However this feature is applicable to the vampire condition only in part, for

while they (or at least most of them) long for their primitive home (the metaphorical place of

humanity), there is no commitment to its restoration because the vampire condition is irreversible. A

kind of commitment can be identified only in the feelings of sympathy and preoccupation that some

vampires have in relation to human beings, especially by those vampires who will defend humanity

against Akasha’s plans at the end of the novel. In relation to geographical places, there is not a place

of origin that all the vampires long for alike, because each one was vampirized in a particular time

and location. Even the place recognized as that of the origin of their “race,” ancient Egypt, is not

considered a homeland by all the vampires. For this very reasons, another feature, “[t]he

development of a return movement which gains collective approbation” (Cohen 274) cannot be
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applied to Rice’s vampires. On the other hand, one of the diasporic features that best apply to

vampires in The Queen of the Damned is that of “[a] troubled relationship with host societies,

suggesting a lack of acceptance at the least or the possibility that another calamity might befall the

group” (Cohen 274). In the novel, the vampires can live only disguised among the humans, upon

whom they feed. The long history of their existence proves that, when the real identity of a vampire

is discovered by human beings, he is hunted down and destroyed. Vampires are predators, a threat

to humanity, and as so, they can never be accepted among humans. This fact hinders the

applicability of another diasporic feature to the case of Rice’s vampires: “[t]he possibility of a

distinctive yet creative and enriching life in host countries with a tolerance for pluralism” (Cohen

274). “A sense of empathy and solidarity with ethnic members in other countries of settlement”

(274), in turn, is a feature that can be related to the case of those vampires. In general, they are

conscious about their existence as a community and are committed to help each other; such

solidarity in The Queen of the Damned can be perceived especially among the members of the

vampire covens, which can be compared to gangues.

Concerning the characteristics of the diaspora condition, other points allow the qualification

of the vampire situation as such. Rice’s vampires seem to be what Cohen calls “the victim diaspora

tradition,” which is negative, “related to enslavement, exile, and displacement, characterizing

especially the Jews’ case” (267). The main characteristic feelings developed by people in victim

diaspora are “isolation and insecurity of living in a foreign place, set adrift, cut off from their roots

and their sense of identity, oppressed by an alien ruling class” (267). Such feelings can be perceived

in Rice’s vampires: they are living in a place that is not theirs (the human realm, and also

geographic locations different from the ones they lived in as human beings), hiding themselves or

appearing only disguised, fearing destruction by the humans, and struggling to understand the

nature of their existence. Rice’s vampires suffer for not knowing what they are in true. They feel as

if their soul was still human but imprisoned in a monstrous body with evil instincts. At the

beginning of the novel, for instance, Lestat reveals such feelings telling the reader that “[t]he human
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in me is closer to the surface than ever — an anguished and hungry being who both loves and

detests this invisible immortal shell in which I’m locked” (The Queen 3). Although it is contestable

that the diaspora of the Jews can be considered the ideal type, the best example of diaspora (Clifford

248), this case is discussed in every work concerning this concept, and can also be compared to the

vampire condition. According to Cohen “Jews were depicted as pathological half-persons, destined

never to realize themselves or to attain completeness, tranquility or happiness so long as they were

in exile” (268). A situation similar to this can be perceived in Lestat’s words about his decision to

become a rock star in the 1980s: “I wanted to be a symbol of evil in a shining century that didn’t

have any place for the literal evil that I am” (The Queen 3). It can also be identified in his

description of how he feels now that his rock star career is over: “so hurtful to be again the outsider,

forever on the fringes, struggling with good and evil in the age-old private hell of body and soul”

(5). Such words, repeated throughout the novel not only by Lestat, but also by other vampires, relate

to what Clifford calls a negative construction of diaspora consciousness, associated with

“experiences of discrimination and exclusion,” “loss, marginality and exile” (256). But the author

also points out the existence of a positive construction of diaspora consciousness: an “identification

with world-historical cultural/political forces” that support the development of “skills of survivor:

strength in adaptive distinction, discrepant cosmopolitanism, and stubborn visions of renewal”

(257). I would relate this positive consciousness with the vampires’ ability to adapt to different

times and places. Rice’s vampires live through the centuries, observing the changes in human

history and adapting themselves to new historical configurations. Besides, during such long life,

they live in different parts of world, knowing different cultures and ways of life and adapting to

them. For this reason, the vampires in The Queen of the Damned acknowledge the privilege of

having experienced important historical moments, or of having been part of an important ancient

civilization, both during their life as humans and during their vampire life (for instance, Marius

lived in the Roman Empire, Pandora in the Greek one, and Lestat experienced the French

Revolution). This knowledge about the development of human history puts them in a position of
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critics of humanity but also allows them to identify future possibilities. The argument of the ancient

vampires against Akasha’s plan of intervening in human history and creating a female reign in the

world is based on this knowledge, as the words of Marius attest:

It is the intolerance of thinking men and women in power who for the first time in

the history of the human race truly want to put an end to injustice in all forms … We

have no right to interrupt their struggle … Even in the last hundred years their

progress has been miraculous; they have righted wrongs that mankind thought were

inevitable. (The Queen 404)

If the loss that constitute the negative side and the hope present in the positive side form, according

to Clifford, the defining tension of diaspora consciousness, the perception of Rice’s vampire can be

classified as such.

Still about diasporic consciousness, Cohen affirms that “a strong attachment to the past or a

block to assimilation in the present and future must exist in order to permit [such] consciousness to

emerge or be retained” (276). In this sense, in Rice’s novel, the presence of a diasporic

consciousness can be perceived in the vampires’ attachment to the memories of their lives as human

beings and in their acknowledgment that either becoming human again or being accepted by the

humans is something almost impossible. This attachment and acknowledgement is what leads to the

recognition of other vampires around the world as members of a same community.

Clifford argues that “diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routs to

construct what Gilroy (1987) describes as alternate public spheres, forms of community

consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to

live inside, with difference” (251). In other words, diaspora people, in order to justify the

conservation of their particularities in relation to the native people of the place they inhabit,

maintain connections with communities with whom they have something in common but who live

in other places. This alternative created by people in diaspora can be perceived in The Queen of the

Damned as the consciousness of being part of a vampire community shattered around the world
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supports the discourse that the vampires can live among humans despite their differences. In an

argument similar to that of Clifford, Stuart Hall defends a concept of diaspora experience “defined

not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a

conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity”

(“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 235). If so, Hall’s concept of diaspora applies to the case of

Rice’s vampires: what defines the vampire community is not a vampiric essential nature (of which

the vampires themselves know nothing), but the differences between vampires and humans and the

differences vampires bear in relation to each other. This last kind of difference, in turn, results from

the internal differences present in each vampire: those between his/her supernatural features and the

human nature that still exists (in part) inside him/her.

3. Exile

Exile is another concept that can applied to the case of the vampires in The Queen of the

Damned, once these creatures are considered as dislocated both from the place of humanity and

from geographical places. According to Peters, the concept of exile “suggests a painful or punitive

banishment from one’s homeland … [that] can be either voluntary or involuntary, … [and that]

generally implies a fact of trauma, an imminent danger, usually political, that makes the home no

longer safely habitable” (19). I am going to start by analyzing the condition of Rice’s vampires in

general. All of them can be considered as living in exile from humanity, as a traumatic event

(vampirization) took them out of human condition. In this sense, in The Queen of the Damned, as

there are cases of both voluntary and involuntary vampirization, there are cases of voluntary and

involuntary exile. Daniel, for instance, is a human journalist (the interviewer of Interview with the

Vampire) who asks Armand to vampirize him because he wants to experience the vantages of being

a vampire (immortality and supernatural powers). Nevertheless, most of the vampires, Lestat

included, were vampirized against their will, being the ones who suffer most for this banishment

from humanity. The character of punishment implicit in exile can also be perceived in the Rice’s
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novel, especially in the vampirization of queen Akasha. Six thousand years ago, she was chosen to

be the queen of Enkyl, who ruled the land later inherited by the Egyptians. Shocked by Enkyl’s

people costume of eating the dead body of their parents, she convinced her king that they should

impose new funeral rituals, telling their subjects that their Gods had ordered so. Akasha ordered that

the twin witches Mekare and Maharet, who were famous for possessing the gift of talking to the

spirits of nature, were brought from their village to tell her subjects that the queen and king were

right. As the witches refused to lie, Akasha ordered that they would be raped, tortured, and sent to

the desert. This attitude raised the wrath of a spirit that used to accompany the twin witches and he

started to torment the whole reign. The subjects, thinking that their sufferings were punishments for

the changes in the funeral rituals, stabbed Akasha and Enkyl to death. But the spirit, who was envy

of human materiality and developed a way of hurting people by suckling their blood, started feeding

on Akasha’s dying body so eagerly that he merged into her. From this moment on, she became the

first vampire, and resurrected Enkyl by giving him her blood. Therefore, Akasha’s transformation

into a vampire was the result of punishments inflicted on her by her subjects and by that spirit. This

character of punishment extends to the condition of all vampires, as they all descend somehow from

Akasha.

Besides Akasha’s, other individual cases in Rice’s story present a character of punishment

and contribute to the identification of situations of exile in the novel. The case of the twin witches,

Mekare and Maharet, deserve attention. After Akasha sent them to the desert, they could get to their

homeland again, where Maharet gave birth to a girl, daughter of the kings’ steward whom the queen

had obliged to rape the twins. Nevertheless, after the vampirization, Akasha ordered her soldiers to

take them back to her reign to explain what was happening. As they could not do so, and neither

could they revert the queen and king’s condition, Akasha got furious and ordered that they would be

mutilated and separated, sent to opposite sides of the world never to return to their land or meet

again. The fact is that, still in prison, the twins were vampirized by Khayman, the steward who had

raped them, and so they lived six thousand years looking for each other around the world. Maybe
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the twin’s is the worst experience of dislocation narrated in Rice’s novel, and it is the one that

represents best the condition of exile. Characteristic features of the exile experience, like the

feelings of shock, disruption and loss, the pining for home or homeland (“the original home” and

“the original state of being”), and the “production of compensatory fantasies” for this longing

(Peters 20) can be identified in the twins’ story. Throughout the novel, we learn how each of the

sisters suffered during so many millenniums of separation and solitary life in strange lands, without

being able to go back to their former place and life. Especially in the case of Maharet, the pining for

home led to a peculiar way of creating compensatory fantasies. She was able to observe the

development of the line of descendents of her daughter through the years, and kept genealogical

records of what she called “The Great Family.” Throughout the generations of this family, which is

spread around the world, she presented herself as the guardian of family traditions. However, she

can never reveal the truth, and so she is always creating stories to justify her struggles to keep the

family members connected and to participate in their lives. Maharet’s family could be considered a

kind of diaspora, in some sense, but this would put all big old families in the same diasporic

condition. What is important about this obsession with genealogical history for the discussion of

concepts of mobility is the fact that it is used as a way for compensating a situation of displacement

that metaphorically represents that of exile.

I would like to consider also Said’s ideas about exile in relation to The Queen of the

Damned. The author defines exile as “the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside

the chatty, familiar world inhabited by natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the

trappings of accommodation and well-being.” This seems true to individual cases of vampires in

Rice’s novel, like those I have just discussed, but only in the level of geographical displacement. In

terms of vampire’s misplacement in a human world, the classification of their experience as exile

becomes more complicated, as what changed after vampirization was only their nature (vampire)

and life habits (nocturnal and predatory). The still inhabit the same world, in the larger sense, that

they inhabited while humans. Their feelings of misplacement is due to the fact that they are not
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living humans anymore, but undead. The problem is that there is not a separate world for the

undead. I believe it can be said, however, that vampires are exiled from humanity living inside

humanity. Their case can be understood in terms of what Said calls “outsider exiles”: “individuals at

odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are

concerned” (“Intellectual Exile” 39). Moreover, the exile experienced by Rice’s vampires, different

from the banishment that characterized pre-modern times, can be related to particularities of

contemporary world. According to Said, in today’s world, the difficulty of life in exile is in the fact

that “your home is not in fact so far way, and that the normal traffic of everyday contemporary life

keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with the old place” (36). The author goes

on saying that exile exists in “a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor

fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and

sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another” (36). I would say that

vampires’ life among humans represents this median state: they were humans once, in a different

setting (in terms of historical, cultural and geographical context), but now there is no place in the

world for what they are. They live in contact with the world that was once theirs, remembering past

lives that cannot be back and conscious that their present identity (as vampire) must be kept in

secret because it confers on them the condition of outcasts. Finally, it is important to consider that

Anne Rice presents The Queen of the Damned as if it was written by the vampire Lestat himself; he

is the narrator and tells us how he is going to write his book in a section that functions like a preface

(from page 3 to 8). Therefore, if Lestat is in exile from humanity and if it is under this condition that

he writes, we can consider his narrative an example of exile literature and relate it to Said’s

argument that exiled writers confer dignity to a condition created to deny people’s access to dignity

and identity (“Reflexões sobre o Exílio” 48). In other words, Lestat’s writing is a form of

compensation for him and for other vampires who feel exiled, a way of coping with the anguish of

one’s own experiences: Rice creates a fictional compensation for fictional exile, representing reality

using the vampire condition as metaphor for displacement.

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4. Nomadism

Nomads are, as Peters puts it, “a face-to-face community, usually linked by ties of kinship

stemming from a real or imagined common ancestor, that travels as a unit;” they have an “attitude

of stealth toward settled power and lack of a permanent homesite (21). Identifying the lives of

Rice’s vampire as nomadic can be supported by the fact that most of them bear no interest in

particular geographic places in their present condition, disregarding the social and political powers

that control people. This is because they are conscious that human world is not their place, as they

are not humans anymore, and, consequently, they do not need to respect state and social authorities.

There is doubleness in nomadic condition, according to Peters: “being at home everywhere, but

lacking any fixed ground, … being homeless and home-full at once” (21); this can also be perceived

in The Queen of the Damned. In their long lives, Rice’s vampires had lived in different places on

earth; they could live some years in fix residences for economic reasons, for instance, but, when

they got bored or were threatened by the danger of having their secret discovered, they went to

another place. They can have many properties in different parts of the world, but none of them is

seen as home. Such attitudes are the result of the feeling of displacement in the world: they do not

belong to any particular place, not even to the earth as a whole, but the vampire abilities of fast

speed and immortality permits them to be at any place they want. If for the Greek “a wondering life

was the curse of the outcast and the barbarian” (Peters 22), and if for Jews, Christians, and Muslins,

journeys were the source of knowledge and faith, metaphors for the transitority of human life on

earth (28), for Rice’s vampires it is a mix of these two visions. The wanderings of Mekare and

Maharet around the world, for instance, are a curse, as the place from which they originated

disappeared through time and they cannot feel at home in anywhere. However, wandering is also a

way of coping with the boredom of an immortal life, as in the case of Armand, Khayman, and

Marius, who like knowing different places and cultures. Finally, considering that “it is the

subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of traveling”
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(Braidotti apud Peters 33), so the vampire existence can be called nomadic, as their lack of

connection with particular places can be justified by their disregard for human conventions.

5. Border crossing

According to Clifford, border is “a site of regulated and subversive crossing” and

borderlands “presuppose a territory defined by a geopolitical line: two sides arbitrarily separated

and policed, but also joined by legal and illegal practices of crossing and communication” (246). I

believe the concepts of border and borderland, though they are related to geographical and political

delimitation of territory, can be applied to abstract notions that characterize Rice’s vampires. They

are creatures that cross the metaphorical borders of life and death and of the human and the

supernatural realms; the fact that this crossing is subversive (against the laws of nature) confers to

the vampires the character of outcast. Vampires, not only in The Queen of the Damned but in

general, live in the threshold between two worlds: the material world of the living and human and

the abstract one of the dead and supernatural. Their bodies are dead but their souls are imprisoned in

them, making of them undead creatures; they are not human anymore but are imprisoned in the

human world. It seems that what keeps the vampires in the human world is the fact that they still

have a materiality, though it is supernaturally attained (the vampiric ability of living again from

human blood). What is peculiar about Rice’s vampire is that the existence of the worlds of the dead

and the supernatural as separate places or realms is uncertain even for them; those are still abstract

notions. Borderland appears then, as an alternative term to explain the abstract, unnamed place

vampires live in. Somehow, they are still part of the living humans because they are among them,

but the vampire condition reminds them that they are also close to death and the supernatural. From

this fact results the double consciousness of the vampires (human/superhuman, or living/dead),

another condition that is characteristic of the dislocated subject.

6. Cosmopolitanism
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Cosmopolitanism is originally defined as the condition of the “citzen of the cosmos”

(Appiah xiv), of a person who feels comfortable among different people in different parts of the

world. However it is a complex notion, related nowadays to idealized attitudes of people in a world

configured by globalization. Appiah explains this notion arguing that it results from the intertwining

of two strands that are not always compatible: “universal concern”, which relates to the “the idea

that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by

the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship”; and “respect for

legitimate difference”, which requires that “we take seriously the value not just of human life but of

particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and belifs (sic) that lend

them significance” (xv). In other words, a cosmopolitan is someone who is interested in and

worried about the conditions of all the peoples around the world alike, and at the same time respects

each of them for their particularities. According to Appiah, cosmopolitanism suggests the “necessity

of an equilibrium between local and universal values” (xxi). In relation to the The Queen of the

Damned, a cosmopolitanism in Appiah’s sense can be perceive in the vampires’ arguments against

Akasha’s plans and in favor of the historical development of humanity. What the queen points out as

sources of evil and destruction (like religious fundamentalism, patriarchal values, primitive rituals),

the other vampires defend as being cultural and historical characteristics of humanity that they, as

outsiders, do not have the right to change. According to those vampires’ discourse, humanity is the

way to the healing of its own maladies through the development of science, technology, philosophy,

and public debate. This discourse is justified by a sense of sympathy and respect most of Rice’s

vampires have in relation to human beings, as it can be perceived in the words of Maharet: ‘‘We’re

not angels, Akasha … We are not gods. To be human, that’s what most of us long for. It is the

human which has become myth to us’’ (451). The vampires lived long enough to witness great

changes in human history and to be in contact with and understand many different cultures around

the world, so that the vampires’ experience puts them in a critical position. They can be considered

cosmopolitans in the old sense, for living in different places and cultures around the world, and also
 15
in Appiah’s sense, for being conscious of both the universality and the particularities of people. It is

through cosmopolitanism that Rice has her vampires representing political issues more clearly.

Smith considers it one of the main themes in The Queen of the Damned the “idea of being able to

feel for others even though they are different” (74). Akasha is the only one in the novel who does

not have this cosmopolitan view, and for so she is destroyed. Smith also calls attention to the fact

Rice’s novel is “full of reunions between people who have loved each other very much in the past

and who reestablish those connections, who reach out to others without jealousy, and who band

together to defeat what seems to all of them to be overwhelming evil.” She argues that this motif

implies, as another theme, “the importance of maintaining connections among all people, no matter

how alien they may seem” (75). In agreement with these considerations, I believe they are related to

the cosmopolitan ideal.

7. Conclusion

My application of concepts of mobility to Rice’s novel The Queen of the Damned proved to

be harder than I was expecting, as the condition of her vampires are so complex that provide many

possibilities of application of those concepts, which are too complex in their own right. I could

perceive that, as in real cases of displacement and relocation, those of Rice’s vampires cannot be

classified accordingly to only one concept, because they bear features that are characteristic of all

the concepts I have investigated. Although this work has not exhausted the possibilities of analysis

of The Queen of the Damned in the terms of concepts of mobility, it allows me to take some

conclusions.

It is interesting to observe that in the experiences of Rice’s vampires, mobility is presented

under a complex form: dislocation from the geographical place that they inhabited while human

beings and relocation after the vampirization; dislocation from human existence and relocation in

the border between the abstract worlds of the living and of the dead; geographical dislocation and

relocation in different parts of the world throughout their long existence while vampires. As I have
 16
argued along this work, such experiences present features characteristic of the conditions of

diaspora, exile, nomadism, border crossing and cosmopolitanism, in a way that one of them is not

sufficient to classify the vampire condition. Nevertheless, I believe that this complex array of

possibilities implied in the vampire condition depicted in The Queen of the Damned contributes to a

larger representation of the experiences of mobility of real life. In this sense, I can conclude that, in

the stories of Rice’s vampires, the use of concepts of mobility allows us to perceive the

metaphorical dimension in which such concepts are used to explain relations with “the other.” All

the anguishes, anxieties, and sufferings of her vampires resemble the complex feelings of real-life

nomads, people in diaspora, in exile, and in borderlands; but at the end of the novel, Rice offers as

an alternative to those sufferings the ideal of cosmopolitan life, which is implied in the vampires’

discourses against Akasha. I would say that a harmonious existence between humans and vampires

is the solution Rice’s novel present for the vampires’ feeling as outsiders and for the same feelings

that afflict the displaced humans that these characters represent.

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large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1996. 27-47.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Introduction: Making Conversation.” Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a

World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. xi-xxi.

Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism. Eds. Steven Vertovec

and Robin Cohen. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar Publ., 1999. 215-51.

Cohen, Robin. “Diasporas and the Nation-State.” Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism. Eds.

Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar Publ., 1999. 266-79.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism. Eds.

Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar Publ., 1999. 299-314.

Konstantinos. Vampires: The Occult Truth. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 2004.

Rice, Anne. The Queen of the Damned. Vampire Chronicles. London: Warner Books. 1994.

Said, Edward W. “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals.” Representations of the

Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage, 1994a. 35-47.

---. “Reflexões sobre o exílio.”Reflexões Sobre o Exílio e Outros Ensaios. Trans. Pedro Maia

Soares. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003. 46-60.

Smith, Jennifer. Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996.