Fanged Future

Johanna Isaacson (bio)

A review of Jenkins, Jerry Rafiki. The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction. Ohio UP, 2019.

At the mention of the word “vampire,” a waxen figure of European origin leaps to mind. However, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins insists in The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction that vampire myths have an under-explored heritage in Africa and African diasporic cultures, and that recent African American vampirology offers a subaltern approach to the genre rather than merely a sub-generic borrowing of Dracula-derived tropes. A figure conjured to navigate the horrors of colonial violence and enslavement through the nineteenth century, the black vampire re-emerges in 1970s vampire films such as Ganja and Hess and Blacula. These works inform the black vampire fiction to come and the resurrection of seemingly white vampire mythology such as the Dracula film adaptations of 1979 and 1992 (4). Yet studies of vampire mythology ignore or minimize the influence of the black vampire (6). In Paradox, Jenkins fills this lacuna by offering a detailed analysis of five black vampire fiction novels. He argues that in their articulation of race and sexuality through the “paradox of mortality,” these texts counter monolithic notions of blackness. In particular, they diverge from conservative religious visions of black unity and insist on

an antinormative project that not only queers the traditional vampire narrative, the black literary imagination, and their guises of universality, but it also … has the potential to denormalize our disdain of hybridity, our boundaries of power, and our obsession with utopias. (8)

Jenkins provides insightful, original, and often compelling readings of works that have been excluded from the canon of vampire fiction largely due to their racial concerns, although the book would have benefited from a more rigorous engagement with scholarly work that complicates categories of race and sexuality. His book is part of an important new series from Ohio University Press; New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative (edited by Susana M. Morris and Kinitra D. Brooks) promises to recognize the significance of African American speculative culture in varied media.

Central to Jenkins’s exploration of the implicit ideologies in the five novels is Steven Cave’s taxonomy of four immortality narratives that cultures adapt to grapple with the “morality paradox”: the fact that we must die but cannot concretely imagine death (Jenkins 11). Cave’s taxonomy includes the “staying alive” narrative, the resurrection narrative, the soul narrative, and the legacy narrative. For Jenkins, most black vampire novels reject soul and legacy narratives in favor of resurrection and staying alive narratives. The latter insist on the corporeality of the black body, and must therefore navigate black earthly experience, black appearance and its meaning, and black physical pain, along with the hope for an earthly freedom from this pain. While the vampire’s status as corporeal undead points to the conception that black identity is defined by the appearance of blackness, Jenkins argues that the novels he explores complicate this notion and instead ask “whether there is more to being black than having a black body” (16). His readings imply that race is ascriptive rather than an inherent part of the body. At times he acknowledges the intractable, structural process of racialization “in a society where economic forms are racialized, and pain is colored black” (27). However, Jenkins returns to a hope of transcending race through the imaginary of black vampire hybridity.

In these moments of transcendence, his analysis risks becoming ahistorical. The immortal status of the vampires Jenkins analyzes allows them to stand outside of time, forming a “post-racial” horizon. Yet the paths to this post-historical status do not dismantle the structures of domination that persistently reinscribe race. The periodization of racialized capitalism is particularly relevant to the gothic mode, as Stephen Shapiro argues in his analysis of Dracula and other Victorian gothic tropes. Historical moments of crisis and rupture reveal the uncanniness of commodity fetishism: the condition in which workers are separated from any possibility of life outside capitalism and are fully alienated from their bodies, which become “units of labor-power for sale,” mere “bearer[s] of a commodity’s social energy,” while the objects they produce appear “autonomous and self-creating, like an awful, supernatural alien towering before its human meat-puppets” (Shapiro 30). In our current moment of crisis and the recalibration of racialized capitalism, we cannot begin to imagine a post-racial world without asking about “the relationship between the oppression of black bodies and the systematic economic exploitation and expropriation of black communities,” as Michael Dawson argues (144). Jenkins’s analysis of historically. Building on Nancy Fraser’s analysis of social reproduction as a central logic of emerging capitalist forms, Dawson examines “‘the hidden abode of race'” as a persistent source of expropriation that creates “inferior humans” necessary for past domination such as slavery and to current forms of super-exploitation. As Chris Chen puts it, race can be best seen as a “relation race, gender, and sexuality in vampire fiction would benefit from situating these categories of domination inside and outside the wage relation—reproduced through superficially non-racial institutions and policies.” It is not race that needs to be dismantled, then, but this relation that must be overcome. For this reason, the “post-racial” imagination needs more precision than Paradox offers.

The book is more successful in denaturalizing a homogeneous view of racial identity and politics through an implicitly intersectional lens, queering the black vampire and evoking a feminist, anti-racist Afrofuturist imaginary. To this end, Jenkins explores Jewel Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, in which a black lesbian vampire cuts a heroic swath through history, systematically reversing the tropes of the European vampire and giving “literary and political significance to the lives of black lesbians” (25). Jenkins makes the case that The Gilda Stories attacks both Afrocentrism and multicultural conservatism as ideologies that rely on a “single-issue view of black freedom” (27). Her “staying alive” vampire, the first in African American vampire fiction, stands as a testament that immortality is not a given for the oppressed; in order to “stay alive” without transforming into monsters, vampires must evolve into a wise and inclusive beings. Jenkins explains that Gilda builds a queer, multicultural, chosen family that righteously battles against enemies—black and white, human and vampire—who wield oppressive power. These antagonists include those who represent an Afrocentric view, which accepts only the narrowest definition of black identity and refuses solidarity based on emotional ties (34), and multicultural conservatives who represent themselves as American dream success stories, thus justifying a color-blind society (36). The vision of “staying alive” in Gilda, Jenkins argues, counters both of these views. The Gilda Stories acknowledges that the black body is defined by its history of pain, and Gilda’s immortality offers a vision of a future liberation from this pain. Thus, transcendence is a visionary, inclusive leap rather than an imagination of individual resurrection or collective “single-issue” rebellion (38). This vision of intersectional experience evokes the Combahee River Collective’s project of creating “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (15).¹

Jenkins’s analysis of “antizealot atheism” in Tananarive Dues’s My Soul to Keep looks to the character David Dawit as a figure of African atheism that contests the conservatism and colonizing subtext of the “all American bourgeois negro” (72). Jenkins describes the prejudice directed toward this African character by African Americans who see him as a “primitive” in need of civilizing Christianity (59). Dawitt defies an African American definition of blackness as inextricably tied to Christian practices. He is tacit proof, Jenkins argues, that “African Americans need to develop a multicultural approach to blackness and a unifying ideology absent of religion” (59). This resurrection vampire offers an alternate vision of immortality to the “soul narrative” of African American Christianity, framing the latter as “incapable of attending to black people’s material needs” (66) and “incapable of real tolerance” (73). Rather than endorsing a program of colonial or Christian conversion and the passivity that comes with religious belief, Dawit’s path suggests the possibility of “black solidarity that is absent of religion” and open to heterogeneity (81). Further, this refusal of religion acknowledges that blackness is ascriptive and inauthentic, not “Ham’s curse” but human creation.

The critique of religion that runs through Paradox is acute and could be further historicized by engaging with Melinda Cooper’s critique of the post-sixties rise of religious control in racialized institutions (such as social welfare and prisons) in the wake of middle class “permanent tax revolt” against racially stigmatized state welfare (262). This evangelical takeover of social programs and institutions, with which black churches were involved, ensured that reform and support would be coupled with conservative, heteronormative compliance (262). The rejection of religion in the vampire novels described by Jenkins illuminates the complex ways in which gender, sexuality and race are ascribed through these institutions.

While My Soul to Keep imagines a feminized Africa in need of civilizing by the Christianity of the “all American bourgeois negro,” Jenkins next explores Dark Corner, which critiques an alternate but still insufficient vision of feminized African Americans in need of masculine invigoration by “authentic” Africans. Jenkins argues that the character Kyle’s father, Diallo—an African warrior vampire—represents “paternal Pan-Africanism” and “heroic slave discourse,” two ideologies that advance patriarchal visions of masculinization and dovetail with the ideology at the heart of the influential “Moynihan report,” which diagnosed impoverished African American families as inadequate due to their lack of masculine father figures (93-94). As Cooper argues, the sexism of the Moynihan report was also a diversion “from the structural factors of urban segregation, discrimination, and educational disadvantage that might implicate contemporary white racism in the reproduction of poverty and pointed instead to the distant crime of slavery as a causal factor” (38). However, according to Jenkins, instead of pointing to this depoliticization, Pan-African ideology “solves” this problem by envisioning a “cultural return to Africa” (94). The “heroic slave” narrative offers a similarly patriarchal solution by imagining the masculine man’s individual struggle, with no possibility of collective resistance (94). Enforcing a singular definition of blackness tied to African identity erases black people who do not fit this mold, evoking Hazel Carby’s critique of patriarchal political formulas in black leadership. Under the guise of self-effacement, Carby sees “a conceptual framework [of the black intellectual] that is gender-specific; not only does it apply exclusively to men, but it encompasses only those men who enact narrowly and rigidly determined codes of masculinity” (10). Instead of valorizing these codes, Jenkins argues that blackness is defined by having a black body that is subject to the definitions, cultural meanings, and prejudices of its time (115).

Jenkins contends that Octavia Butler’s Fledgling complicates the definition of blackness in the previous three novels – “the only requirement for being black is having a black body” (117). He explores Butler’s concept of “body knowledge” to assert that the meaning of the body is not biologically determined but is rather a social construct (118). His view of blackness seems to converge with that of Stuart Hall, who argues “black is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature” (“New Ethnicities” 443). Jenkins’s Afrofuturistic vision begins to take shape with his engagement with Butler. The supernatural figures he describes converge with J. Griffith Rollefson’s description of Afrofuturism as an “oppositionality and an historical critique that seeks to undermine the logic of linear progress that buttresses Western universalism, rationalism, empiricism, logocentrism, and their standard-bearer: white supremacy” (84). Building on Butler’s notion that human intelligence is stoppered by our tendency to emphasize domination, Jenkins disentangles these impulses with the terms “hierarchical body knowledge” and “intelligent body knowledge” (119). The former encompasses “the idea that social hierarchies are determined by visible differences among human populations,” while the latter recognizes that ideas about bodies enforce differences and hierarchies (119). Jenkins argues that Fledgling‘s Shori Matthews, who transcends black pain as a “staying alive” vampire, represents a utopian triumph of “intelligent body knowledge” that projects the possibility of a post-racial world. He calls this “transhuman blackness,” in which the blackness (skin pigmentation) of all humans is recognized and free from hierarchical ascriptions (122). As an engineered being, Shori represents a convergence of the “staying alive” narrative with technological utopianism, but Jenkins attempts to distinguish Butler’s vision from anti-collective libertarianism or techno-idealism (128). He insists that Shori’s liminal status between human and posthuman denaturalizes “hierarchical body knowledge” and allows a focus on socially constructed meanings of the black body (129). This converges with Rollefson’s concept of Afrofuturist “myth science,” a dialectical engagement with the binary view of “white science” and “black magic.” Myth science both critiques the myths of “progress” that support white colonial domination, and questions the essentialist assumptions behind representations of black authenticity or primitivism (Rollefson 85).

The last text Jenkins examines is K. Murry Johnson’s Image of Emeralds and Chocolate, a novel that features the first black gay male vampire. This figure serves as a lens into the possibilities for “black sexual politics” that recognize the imbrication and mutual construction of racism and homophobia. This enlightened ideology is set against a conservative religious black sexual politics that separates these oppressions and condemns homosexuality (150). Such “homonegativity” pressures gay black people to keep their sexuality “in the coffin.” Jenkins argues that the gay characters in Image implicitly critique “Black church corporatism” and conservatism, the notions that African Americans should speak in one voice and that gay men should submit to the “civilizing force” of the church. The liberation of Marquis, a gay black slave who simultaneously transforms into a vampire and a free man, is enabled by his approach to the Bible. Jenkins calls this approach “education for liberation” and distinguishes it from “education for salvation” (155). Marquis’s biblical education does not lead him to reject his own sexuality but to become an abolitionist who abets Harriet Tubman in creating the Underground Railroad and continues to play a key role in black liberation movements through his immortal future. Marquis goes on to have healthy gay relationships and becomes proof that conservative religious ideology does not define blackness. Instead, his path to identity formation leads to the conclusion that “the only requirement for being a black man in America is having a black body” (174). Jenkins interprets this as Johnson’s call for “a conception of black solidarity founded on real tolerance … [acknowledging] that queer and straight black men are just black men in the eyes of white supremacy” (174).

Jenkins’s readings build toward a call for a “new black” politics, “a cross-racial coalition of disenfranchised groups that are ultimately defined by their politics and class rather than by physical characteristics” (176). He argues that this recognizes race as a myth that remains very much alive in the national consciousness, as seen by the rise of Trumpian white supremacy and the continued economic marginalization of African Americans (177-178). Jenkins convincingly shows the potency of African American speculative genre narratives to convey black historical trauma and impasses in racial identification, and the ingenuity with which African American culture has always imagined utopian horizons and possible paths to liberation. These themes are also explored in another title in Ohio’s New Suns series, Afrofuturism Rising. Both books at moments place President Obama in the lineage of this utopian trajectory, despite his exclusion of people of color through immigration policies and drone warfare. This may be symptomatic of the series’ need for more attention to structural racism in its analyses of the work of African American speculative narratives. Nevertheless, the series promises to foreground works often overlooked in explorations of genre fiction, film, comics, and other media, and can only assist in the rise of an Afrofuturism inclusive of queer and feminist voices. The Black speculative works explored in Paradox and the New Suns series bring to mind Robin D.G. Kelley’s evocation of the promise of black “freedom dreams” in his exploration of Black surrealism: “a living, mutable, creative vision of a world where love, play, human dignity, an end to poverty and want, and imagination are the pillars of freedom” (158).

Footnotes

1. The Combahee River Collective were a group of black feminist lesbians who formed a radical splinter group from the National Black Feminist Organization in 1974 and continued meeting, writing, and organizing until 1980, when their most influential tract—”The Combahee River Collective Statement”—was published. The statement examined the particularities of black women’s struggles and the need to prioritize self-organization and the examination of “manifold and simultaneous” oppressions of their own experiences, while insisting on solidarity with other struggles. The Collective is credited with pioneering the idea of “identity” politics and has been a touchstone for theorists who insist on a definition of identity politics that resists individualism or separatism. This approach has been a key influence on some of the strongest contemporary theories of race, gender, sexuality, and class such as intersectionality theory and social reproduction theory.

Works Cited

• Carby, Hazel. Race Men. Harvard UP, 2009.
• Chen, Chris. “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes Towards an Abolitionist Antiracism.” Endnotes 3, Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes, Sept. 2013, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/chris-chen-the-limit-point-of-capitalistequality. Accessed 28 Feb. 2020.
• Combahee River Collective. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Haymarket Books, 2017.
• Cooper, Melinda. Family Values. The MIT Press, 2017.
• Dawson, Michael C. “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crisis and the Racial Order.” Critical Historical Studies, vol. 3, no.1, Spring 2016, pp. 143–161.
• Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Marley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge, 1996.
• Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Beacon Press, 2003.
• Rollefson, J. Griffith. “The ‘Robot Voodoo Power’ Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-Anti Essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith.” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2008, pp. 83-109.
• Shapiro, Stephen. “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-system and Gothic Periodicity.” Gothic Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2008, pp. 29-47.