Kindred Spirits: The Speculative Fictions of Pauline E. Hopkins, Octavia E. Butler, and Tananarive Due

Abstract

CLA JOURNAL 95 94 CLA JOURNAL Tosha Sampson-Choma Black Power!, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY. Curator; Kevin Young, Museum Director. February 1, 2017-December 31, 2017. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism: A Poetics of Anticolonialism, 2000 edition. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Christian, Mark.“The Politics of Black Presence in Britain and Black Male Exclusion in the British Education System.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 35, no 3, 2005, pp. 327-346. Dyson, Michael Eric.“The Politics of Black Masculinity and the Ghetto in Black Film.” The Subversive Imagination: The Artist, Society, and Social Responsibility. Ed. Carol Becker. New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 154-167. Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Hammond, Thomas N.“Paris-New York: Venues of Migration and the Exportation of African American Culture.” CLAJ, vol. 41, no. 2, 1997, pp.135-46. Henry, Matthew.“He Is a ‘Bad Mother*$%@!#’: Shaft and Contemporary Black Masculinity.” African American Review, vol. 38, no. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 119-126. Levy, Andrea. Fruit of the Lemon. London: Review, 1999. Rassool, Naz.“Fractured or Flexible Identities? Life Histories of ‘Black’ Diasporic Women in Britain.” Black British Feminism: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 187-204. Kindred Spirits: The Speculative Fictions of Pauline E. Hopkins, Octavia E. Butler, and Tananarive Due Marlene D. Allen Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood, Tananarive Due’s African Immortal series, and Octavia E. Butler’s final novel Fledgling may at first glance seem not to bear much in common, given the basic premises of each novel and different times in which the works were written. Published from 1902 to 1903 in the Colored American magazine during the“nadir”of African American literary history,Of One Bloodisafantasticalromancethatfeaturesaprotagonistof mixedrace,ReuelBriggs, who has turned his back on his African heritage to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor and scientist of the occult. Due’s four-part African Immortal Series (My Soul to Keep [1997], The Living Blood [2001], Blood Colony [2008], and My Soul to Take [2011]) tells the story of four-hundred-year-old African David Wolde, a member of the immortal Brotherhood, and his relationship with his twentiethcentury wife Jessica and their hybrid human-immortal child Fana. Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling (2005) features vampires called the Ina who are at war with each other over differing opinions of the morality of the creation of Shori Matthews, a vampire-human hybrid. Despite major differences in characters, setting, and plotlines, the works are all Afrofuturist feminist texts that employ the narrative freedom of speculative fiction to memorialize African diasporic history and culture in innovative ways. I explore common motifs, themes, and techniques utilized by these authors to signify upon the traumas of Afrodiasporic enslavement, evoke the painful legacies of American racism and sexism, and refute science-based notions from the past about the inferiority of black bodies and intellect. In the end, each author’s work advocates for an Afrofuturist world in which the sharing of blood and peaceful co-existence across racial and gender lines are posited as a healthier alternative to the characters’ present realities of biological exclusion and male domination as the prevailing world paradigms. USE OF GOTHIC CONVENTIONS TO EVOKE THE AFRODIASPORIC PAST One of the ways that all three writers memorialize Afrodiasporic history is through the use of gothic conventions. It might seem oxymoronic to say that the gothic is also an aspect of Afrofuturism because of the gothic’s association with the past,while the very term“Afrofuturism”implies looking forward in time. However, an essential aspect of Afrofuturism as an artistic aesthetic is its preoccupation with the past and Afrodiasporic history. As Alondra Nelson expresses, “AfroFuturist CLA JOURNAL 97 96 CLA JOURNAL Marlene D. Allen narratives insist that who we’ve been and where we’ve traveled is always an integral component of who we can become.They create reflections on the African diasporic past and renderings of our possible futures. These are past-future visions, and in this sense, AfroFuturism is an antidote to unbridled, raceless future-lust” (2). As such, one of the most powerful...