Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling

Abstract

Vampires are a ubiquitous presence in contemporary American culture. The recent popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight Saga, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the Underworld films, and HBO's True Blood, among other works, not only reflects how saturated popular culture is with vampires but also the enduring importance of these figures. Today's vam - pires, whether they are bloodthirsty killers or brooding romantic heroes, are as seductive to the public imaginary as were their nineteenth-century counterparts and often represent both an enchanted escape from our understood reality and a commentary thereof. Previous manifestations of the vampire phenomenon reflected, for example, xenophobic concerns about foreign contagion or the horrors of same-sex desire, among other things. Contemporary iterations, however, often underscore some of the anxieties mainstream culture has with our current multicultural and postracial society by seeking to reinstate the supremacy of whiteness, often through such tropes as the triumph of a lily-white vampire slayer or through nostalgia for an all-powerful white man who is a vampire. Vampire texts by people of color are often invested in significantly different cultural projects, ones that more often than not trouble norma - tive notions of race, fantasy, and power that vampires so often represent in dominant popular discourse. To that end, this essay argues that black women's vampire fiction challenges conventional tropes in contemporary vampire lore in a way that suggests a concerted literary tradition in African American speculative fiction. Using Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling (2005a) as a representative text, I contend that the novel offers a black feminist Afrofuturist epistemology that transgressively revises the contemporary