Table of Contents 6.1

EDITORIAL REMARKS

GWENDOLYN D. POUGH
YOLANDA HOOD Speculative Black Women: Magic, Fantasy, and the Supernatural

CRITICISM

JERRILYN McGREGORY Nalo Hopkinson's Approach to Speculative Fiction Although speculative fiction has long privileged subversive modes, Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring redoubles the effect by antithetically hijacking this literary market. In turn, one encounters a number of cultural and political articulations at the center of sf and literary studies, i.e., the disruption of binaries, the recentering of womanism, the construction of mystical realism, the redefinition of "cognitive estrangement," and the privileging of transnational cultures while combating excessive universalism. Hopkinson syncretizes traditional West African-derived belief system with the fantastical. She exploits the degree to which sf renders the real unreal and creates an atmosphere of alienating defamiliarization for readers who stand as "outsiders" in relation to New World African religions.
GRETCHEN MICHLITSCH Breastfeeding Mother Rescues City: Nalo Hopkinson's Ti-Jeanne as Superhero In Breastfeeding Mother Rescues City," Gretchen J. Michlitsch considers Ti-Jeanne, the Afro-Caribbean Canadian protagonist of Nalo Hopkinson's novel , as a compelling literary model for women who take on the challenge of combining breastfeeding motherhood with work in the public realm. Mitchlitsch analyzes the heroine's engagement with the villain who controls the dystopic, near-future Toronto, attending especially to Ti-Jeanne's resentment of her responsibilities as a (young and single) mother and her interactions with Eshu and the other Afro-Caribbean spirits.
KATHY DAVIS PATTERSON 'Haunting Back': Vampire Subjectivity in The Gilda Stories 'Haunting Back': Vampire Subjectivity in The Gilda Stories, derives its inspiration from an essay titled "Vampire Gothic," written by Teresa Goddu. Goddu makes the compelling assertion that "As the producers of terror instead of its text, African-American writers use the gothic to haunt back, re-working the gothic's conventions to intervene in discourses that would demonize them" (137-138). It is my contention that The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez, represents just such a 'haunting back.' The Gilda Stories is one of the relatively few vampire novels with a female vampire protagonist. Gomez further complicates her construction of vampiric Otherness by presenting a worldview from the perspective of a character who is also black and lesbian. Through Gilda and her other vampire characters, Gomez re-works numerous tropes of vampire fiction - especially strength, immortality, homosexuality, and blood drinking - turning them from signs of corruption into tools for personal and collective empowerment. I explore the foregrounding and validation of Gilda's blackness, her womanhood, and her lesbianism at length, noting the importance of this hybridity to both her identity and her survival. Because Gilda's survival is rooted in signifiers (black/woman/lesbian) that the dominant (white/male/heterosexual) Western discourse traditionally devalues, the novel 'haunts back' that discourse with an image of itself as stagnant, willfully ignorant and ultimately unnecessary to the diverse and evolving vampire tribe that Gomez implies will endure, growing beyond and in spite of it - not with it.
TERESA N. WASHINGTON Power of the Word/Power of the Works; the Signifying African Soul of Africana Women's Literature Seeking to introduce African cosmological and philosophical concepts into the critical analysis of Africana literature, "Power of the Word / Power of the Works" uses the Yoruba concepts of Òrò, power of the word and Àjé, the spiritual power of women, to elucidate the verbal, spiritual, and artistic arts and powers of Africana women in life and literature.
GINA WISKER 'Your Buried Ghosts Have A Way of tripping You Up': Revisioning and Mothering in African American and Afro-Caribbean Women's Speculative Horror This essay looks at Tananarive Due's, Toni Brown's 'Immunity,' Nalo Hopkinson's , "Greedy Choke Puppy" and Jewelle Gomez arguing that they represent a new contribution to African American / Afro Caribbean women's speculative fictions and horror. Each has a dual focus on recuperating/revisioning, recognizing the influence of the spiritual and the supernatural in the everyday and in placing centre stage the mother or grandmother as the key nurturing force who enables development of identity, history and responsibility. Jewelle Gomez, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, and Toni Brown have made significant contributions to the development of a new hybrid form, African American and Afro Caribbean women's speculative horror. In this new speculative horror form, each writer moves away from traditional (white, western) female Gothic to re-examine motherdaughter and/or grandmother-granddaughter maternal roles as significant in enabling women to develop a sense of identity, self-worth, nurturing and community values.
SARAH WOOD Subversion through Inclusion: Octavia Butler's Interrogations of Religion in Wild Seed and Xenogenesi A prominent theme of Octavia Butler's speculative fiction is the negotiation and interrogation of religious discourses traditionally used to substantiate sexism and racism. This essay will analyze how the trilogy and chronologically the first of the series, challenge the assumptions of a predominantly white-authored and historically inscribed patriarchal Judeo-Christianity. The essay will argue that Butler is able to query the authority and hegemony of western Judeo-Christianity by repositioning "outcast" figures of femininity and introducing alternative religious traditions specific to the African American tradition. It will also suggest that the speculative framework Butler employs enables a radical visualization of empowered black womanhood that subverts through the inclusion, amalgamation and revision of the various religious traditions and mythologies available to African Americans.

SPEECH

NALO HOPKINSON Address Given at The College of New Jersey, Department of African American Studies, 30th Anniversary Symposia: "Afrofuturism: Womanist Paradigms for the New Millennium" This is a speech in which Nalo Hopkinson talks about the importance of research on African and the African Diaspora and charts her own process as a researcher and a writer.

FICTION

MARCIA DOUGLAS Marie-Ma Night falls and Marie-ma walks in the hot pepper patch. She is barefooted and wears a long white nightgown. I am watching her from the window above my bed. I have turned off the lamp so that she won't notice. One after the other, Marie-ma snaps the hot peppers from their stems and plops them into her mouth as if they are as sweet as plumbs. The yellow ones are her favorite-- she stuffs them two at a time while her dark eyes quick as mosquitoes search for more. When the peppers are all gone, she turns on her small feet and leaves the yard.
KIINI IBURA SALAAM K-USH: The Legend of the Last Wero The seekers wait, hungrily, as K-Ush rises, hovering close to the ceiling of the dogra. Her large eye is closed, but she can feel them-the seekers-crouched on the dirt floor below. Their heads are lowered, hands raised. They send shards of prayer up to the ceiling, puncturing K-Ush's trance. Their needs-hesitant, but insistent-hit her at once, a skull-splitting pain flashes across her forehead. Her large skeletal hands twitch. She hears the tiny, timid voice of a seeker plead for help. She'd like to drift down to the floor, wrap her bony fingers around the seeker's neck and squeeze. She grits her teeth instead, and forces her body to relax. She rubs the hem of her robe with a claw-like toe and speaks.
ANDREA SHAW Jus' a Pinch of the Yellow Powder "Jus' a Pinch of the Yellow Powder" is first person narrated story set in a decaying neighborhood in Kingston, Jamaica. The protagonist, Miss Clarice, is an aging matriarch with supernatural skills that she uses for the benefit of her small community. However, when an outsider disrespects Miss Clarice and puts her young ward in danger, Miss Clarice uses her magical talents to deal with him, and she does not hesitate to give us all the details herself.

POETRY

HELEN CRUMP Morning Wake-up Sun Lying on my stomach, head pillowed by the cross-fold of my arms, my right leg moved against the back of the right in that subconscious and conscious rocking motion --that reflects the habit of infancy and childhood, that soothed the body and spirit, eased the mind, and called forth the peace and comfort of sleep.
ASERET SIN Poetrix birthed in the sacred well steeped in the furtive pot rhythms wriggle forth Damballah-Style
ASERET SIN Sister Ancestor what Zora Neale Hurston did for Marie Leveau Alice Walker did for Zora Neale Hurston

INTERVIEW

YOLANDA HOOD Interview with Tananarive Due This is an interview between scholar Yolanda Hood and horror fiction writer Tananarive Due. The interview too place in the spring of 2004.
GWENDOLYN D. POUGH Interview with L. A. Banks This is an interview between scholar Gwendolyn Pough and horror fiction writer L.A. Banks. The interview took place in the spring of 2004.

REVIEWS

CANDICE M. JENKINS Review of Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism This is a review of Patricia Hill Collin's 2004 text.
GRETCHEN J. MICHLITSCH Review of The Salt Roads This is a review of Nalo Hopkinson's 2003 novel.
KATHY DAVIS PATTERSON Review of Minion: A Vampire Huntress Legend This is a review of L.A. Banks's 2003 novel.
JENNIFER THORINGTON SPRINGER Review of Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction This is a review of Nalo Hopkinson's edited 2000 anthology.
ALICIA THOMAS Review of The Awakening: A Vampire Huntress Legend This is a review of L.A. Banks's 2003 novel.
CARMIELE Y. WILKERSON Review of Love This is a review of Toni Morrison's 2003 novel.

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