“Of Vampire Born”: Interracial Mothering in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

Marie-Luise Löffler earned her M.A. from the University of Leipzig in 2006, majoring in American Studies and Art History. Her studies have taken her to the United States, where she was a student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, researched at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and was most recently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on her PhD at the American Studies Department of the University of Leipzig, where she focuses on the construction of interracial motherhood and mothering relationships in contemporary African American fantasy and science fiction writing. Her academic interests can be broadly summarized as falling between the fields of African American Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Gender Studies, focusing in particular on the depiction of whiteness in contemporary African American literature and feminist theories of motherhood.

“Of Vampire Born”: Interracial Mothering in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

Marie-Luise Löffler

Abstract

Focusing on the portrayal of motherhood in black women’s speculative fiction, this essay discusses Jewelle Gomez’s short story “Louisiana 1850” (1991) and explores how Gomez establishes an egalitarian interracial maternal relationship between a white woman and a slave child. I will demonstrate how the trope of a maternal vampire in particular not only functions in the story to make a mothering relationship plausible, but ultimately challenges and dismantles normative maternal categories, both white and black.

Full Text:

HTML

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5283/copas.110

Refbacks

There are currently no refbacks.

Current Objectives of
Postgraduate American Studies

ISSN: 1861-6127