Black Female Vampires in African American Womens Novels, 19772011: She Bites Back [Paperback]

This book critically situates the figure of the black female vampire in several fields of study including literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race studies. Black female vampires continue to appear as important literary devices and revealing indicators of cultural attitudes and trends about African American womens bodies. This book examines five novels written by four African American women writers to investigate what it means to represent African American womanhood through the lens of vampirism, interrogate how these representations connect to or stem from historical representations of African American women, and explore how representations of black female vampires in African American womens literature simultaneously negate, reinforce, or dismantle stereotypes of African American women.Kendra R. Parkeris assistant professor of African American Literature in the Department of Literature at Georgia Southern University

She Bites Back explores the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the vampire historically and as it appears in African American womens fic?tion, particularly as these texts use the vampire to interrogate notions of black womens 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 diver?sitynot as an age but as a necessary, significant, and potentially trans?formative 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 societys glƒ