They Poured Fire on Us From The Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan

Throughout his career Ben Jonson drew variously upon Lucian, whom he encountered in the mythographies as well as in several Greek and Latin editions he owned. Jonson's receptions take the form of glancing reminiscence in the masques, as Lucian supplies mythological decoration and literary conceit. They appear as transformative allusion in Cynthia's Revels, which draws upon several satirical Dialogues of the Gods, and in The Staple of News, which re-appropriates a favorite satirical dialogue, Timon, the Misanthrope, to satirize the greed of the news industry. Jonson practices an extended and creative imitatio of Lucian's fantastic moon voyages (A True Story and Icaromenippus) in his much neglected News from the New World Discovered in the Moon. And, likewise, Jonson reworks Lucian extensively for the action of Poetaster: The Carousal supplies the lascivious banquet of 4.5, and Lexiphanes, the humiliating purge of Crispinus. Jonson's rich engagement with Lucian comes to a climax in Volpone, which borrows directly from The Dream, and several Dialogues of the Dead. Here whimsical ancient satire enables stern moral allegory. Responding to Poetaster in Satiro-mastix, Thomas Dekker has Captain Tucca rebuke Horace (i.e. Ben Jonson) by sarcastically calling him “Lucian.” Jonson, no doubt, took the proffered insult as the highest compliment.

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Vampires of Color: A Critique of Multicultural Whiteness

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423083.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Dale Hudson

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Civil Rights ◽

White Privilege ◽

Political Representation ◽

White Trash ◽

National Values ◽

Lost Boys ◽

Classical Hollywood

This chapter explores whiteness’s purported expansion through multiculturalism after Civil Rights and the Immigration Act of 1965. By yoking the inclusivity of multiculturalism and exclusivity of whiteness, multicultural whiteness sustains white privilege without acknowledging it, granting conditional or provisional inclusion to select nonwhite groups. It becomes a performative category (“white-identified-ness”) questioned in films like Blacula (1972), Ganja and Hess (1973), Martin (1976), Fright Night (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), Near Dark (1987), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and The Addiction (1995). Classical Hollywood whiteness is transformed by greater emphasis on so-called national values—individualism, consumerism, patriotism, secularism, and willful amnesia—that sustain foundational myths of a nation of immigrants, land of opportunity, and beacon of democracy. Within the proliferation of representations of a multicultural United States, films question limitations on political representation for anyone not identifying—or being identified—with whiteness, including so-called white trash.

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