Bites from the Margins: Contemporary African American Women’s Vampire Literature
Marie-Luise Löffler, Florian Bast

Black women's literature has always striven to reclaim the black female body and black female subjectivity from dominant cultural discursive formations. This focus is also crucial within black women's vampire fiction. Reading Jewelle Gomez's Louisiana 1850 and Octavia Butler's Fledgling, this paper shows how black women writers have claimed the vampire to deconstruct white supremacist, patriarchal power dynamics, as formerly marginalized characters claim coporeal and discursive control of their lives. Fusing core concerns of black women's literature with the multi-metaphoric potential of the vampire, black women writers thus radically transform the conventions of traditional vampire lore.