Any Other Age: Vampires and Oceanic Lifespans

This article argues that the vampire is the metaphorical vehicle for literary representations of “oceanic lifespans,” or lived temporalities that derive from liberal humanist dispossession. Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) are vampire novels that interrupt conventional narratives about temporality—which include historical time, chronological time, and national time—to explore oceanic narratives, such as the artificial time of adulthood or the immortal time of girlhood. Through such an interruption, the vampires that Gomez and Butler invent explore alternatively nonhegemonic versions of what living history means.