The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction by Jerry Rafiki Jenkins (review)

Scholarship and creative works on black speculative fiction—whether black horror, Afrofuturism, the Black Fantastic, or black science fiction—have been published, read, and taught at a furious pace for the past decade in the United States. Colleges regularly include Afrofuturism or black speculative fiction in their course rotations; academic conferences dedicate their themes to Afrofuturism (the 2020 College Language Association Convention is one such example), and publications exploring blackness in speculative fiction release yearly: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2019), Sami Schalk's Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction (2018), André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016). It is in these broader contexts of blackness in speculative fiction that Jerry Rafiki Jenkins's The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction (2019) should be considered.

The Paradox of Blackness, a chronological approach to African American vampire novels set in the United States, investigates Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991), Tananarive Due's My Soul to Keep (1997), Brandon Massey's Dark Corner (2004), Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling (2005), and K. Murray Johnson's Image of Emeralds and Chocolate (2012). Though Jenkins's book is not the first academic monograph on black vampires—it follows the publications of Giselle Liza Anatol's The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (2015) and Kendra R. Parker's She Bites Back: Black Female Vampires in African American Women's Novels, 1977-2011 (2018)—it is the first to explore masculinity, manhood, and black gay men largely within the context of the Black Church. The focus on black masculinities and sexualities is of particular note; Jenkins devotes three of the five chapters to black masculinities (a contrast to Anatol's and Parker's publications). For Jenkins, these five novels ask and answer: "Is there more to being black than having a black body?" This question, like the vampire, seems to persist across time and space. However, The Paradox's success rests not on Jenkins's answer to this question, but rather Jenkins's overall claim: that these texts invite us to admit that sexism, homophobia, multicultural conservatism, paternal Pan-Africanism, and heroic slave discourses are not only anti-black but also antithetical to black liberation and solidarity.

Jenkins's introduction, "The Vampire's Blackness," frames the discussion of black vampires by employing Stephen Cave's "Mortality Paradox," or the "theory that death for humans is both inevitable and impossible" (11), to undergird the book's analytical and organizational approach. According to Jenkins, Cave identifies four narratives that help us confront this paradox: the Staying Alive Narrative, the Resurrection Narrative, the Soul Narrative, and the Legacy Narrative. For the purposes of Jenkins's study, the Staying-Alive Vampire (the vampire who wants to stay alive "during the here and now") and the Resurrection Vampire (a human who dies and lives again as a vampire) are portrayed in the only two narratives that apply to the works under his investigation. This introduction, clear and thoughtfully constructed, offers a roadmap effectively guiding a reader unfamiliar with the literary works, the scholarship surrounding Jenkins's approach, or with the historical and cultural landscape of vampires.

Chapter One, "Blackness, Freedom, and the Staying-Alive Vampire in The Gilda Stories," is a revision of Jenkins's 2016 African American Review article, "Race, Freedom, and the Black Vampire in Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories." Arguing that The Gilda Stories rejects Afrocentrism's "body-equals-culture discourse" (26), multicultural conservatism's color-evasive ideology (26), and the Black Church's "heteropatriarchy" (51), Jenkins convincingly posits that The Gilda Stories is a queer critique of the monolithic view of blackness and freedom characteristic of Afrocentrism and multicultural conservatism...