Celebrating Difference and Community: The Vampire in African-American and Caribbean Women’s Writing

Abstract

The figure of the postcolonial vampire in writing by African-originated women from the US and the Caribbean engages with issues of history, power, gender, identity and self-worth. It represents and enacts the discomfort of an everyday reminder of the hidden denials and destruction of the colonial and imperial past and the liminal spaces limed with that past in which we now all walk and live. Where the postcolonial Gothic and the figure of the vampire — boundary crosser, transgressive, invasive Other — are inflected by gender, these works deal with more than a troubled, violent, repressed past, engaging with the debilitating effects of internalizing a negative view of self and a lack of self-worth, which spawns self-doubt and vulnerability. But they also offer new hope and models for change, explicitly in revaluing self, in community and hybridity. Jewelle Gomez, Octavia Butler, Toni Brown, L.A. Banks, Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson use the figure of the vampire to represent losses, frustrated longings and denials, and to suggest a new sense of self-worth, responsibility, hybridity, community and agency. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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