Lexington Books
Pages: 188
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-5317-9 • Hardback • November 2018 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-4985-5319-3 • Paperback • August 2020 • $41.99 • (£32.00)
978-1-4985-5318-6 • eBook • November 2018 • $39.50 • (£30.00)
Kendra R. Parkeris assistant professor of African American Literature in the Department of Literature at Georgia Southern University
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The First Bite
1. “I’m not the vampire he is; I give in return for my taking.” The Black Female Vampire Figure
in Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind
2. Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories: Black Female Vampire as a New American Monomyth
3. Intersectional Disempowerment and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Vindication of the Rights of Anita Hill in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling?
4. “She’s not turning. She’s in flux”: The Ability/Disability System in L.A. Banks’s The Bitten
5. Rehabilitative Logic: Sex Work, Procreation, and Vampires in Pearl Cleage’s Just Wanna Testify
Afterword: The Final Bite
Bibliography
She Bites Back explores the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the vampire historically and as it appears in African American women’s fiction, particularly as these texts use the vampire to interrogate notions of black women’s sexuality, agency, and value in varied communities. . . Parker offers significant insight into the ways contemporary African American women writers reinvent possibilities for black women through evaluating and rejecting tired tropes, positing and practicing an ethics of care, and claiming the right to agency, power, and self-definition, but doing so not as a monolith but through inventive, imaginative diversity—not as an “age” but as a necessary, significant, and potentially transformative moment.
— Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
She Bites Back relocates the image of the black female vampire from the margins of our imaginations to the center of our consciousness. Kendra R. Parker reveals how and why the black woman has been employed to represent some of Western society’s greatest fears and most passionate desires. Exhilarating scholarship!— Gregory Jerome Hampton, Howard University
Parker’s masterful work provides a profound, visionary analysis of the negative images and stereotypes black women have historically confronted and overcome in American society. Her insights illuminate the awesome creativity that’s helped reclaim and protect black female dignity and identity from poisonous cultural colonization.— Fred L. Johnson III III, Hope College
Parker’s energetic, well-researched book chronicles the creative and subversive ways black women have written about vampires. Rooted in history, but firmly aimed at the present and future, Parker’s research and analysis reveal the deeper meaning behind black women’s depictions of vampires in myriad forms—and how sometimes the unhuman can be the most human rendering of all.— Tananarive Due, University of California, Los Angeles
Parker wrests the vampire from the throes of the Gothic to reveal its complex relationship with black women’s bodies. She journeys from the history of the vampire as a conduit for the fears of a eurocentric society to the moment when black women writers assume ownership of the vampire as their own tool of expression.— Tarshia L. Stanley, St. Catherine University