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“Of Vampire Born”: Interracial Mothering in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
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>>INTRODUCTION FROM AUTHOR<< While the use of the supernatural in African American fiction to explore issues of both race and gender has been acknowledged, not least since the publication of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), less well known black women writers of horror and science fiction (with the exception of Octavia Butler) have been largely excluded by publishing houses and mostly ignored within the scholarship of the field in general. Only recently have works by speculative fiction writers such as Jewelle Gomez, Tananarive Due, Andrea Hairston, and Nalo Hopkinson gained more extensive critical attention, a trend that is reflected in anthologies like Dark Matter (2000) and Afro-Future Females (2008). Besides being actively engaged with the historical past, recovering “things forgotten and the tragedy of forgetfulness” (Shawl 131), these black women writers re-negotiate, as Marleen Barr notes, “a whole set of gendered and racialized dichotomies” (xvii). This observation especially holds true for the portrayal of motherhood in these texts. Flouting the norms of realism and rational explanation, their work “unravels, displaces and interrogates traditional scripts of motherhood” (Abbey and O’Reilly 16)—that is, of both black and white maternity. It is within the realm of the speculative that these black women writers explore interracial mothering2 as a new trope which allows them—to paraphrase Shelley Fisher Fiskin—to not only complicate blackness but also interrogate whiteness.
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