Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, LaGuardia Community College/The Research Paper: Octavia Butler's Fledgling (Spring 2015)/sandbox team 3 draft

=Team 3 Sections=

Backgrounds
In an interview with Juan Gonzalez ("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gonzalez_(journalist)") and Amy Goodman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Goodman") for Democracy Now!, Butler explained that she had written Fledgling as a diversion after becoming overwhelmed by the grimness of her Parable series. To distract herself, she had read vampire fantasy novels, which tempted her to try writing one. As she explained in an interview with Allison Keyes, it took her a while to find the focus of the novel until a friend suggested that what vampires wanted besides human blood was the ability to walk in the sun. She then decided to create vampires as a separate species and have them engineer the capacity to withstand sunlight by adding human melanin to their DNA.

Though Fledgling is unique on its take on what motivates vampires, it is not the first story to have a black vampire as its protagonist. In the 1970s, the films Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream depicted a black vampire as the nemesis of white supremacists. In the 1990s, the Blade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_(film)") film series, based on a Marvel Comics character, introduced a black human-vampire superhero who can tolerate sunlight. In addition, according to scholars Joy Sanchez-Taylor and Susana M. Morris, Fledgling belongs to a flourishing tradition of Afrofuturistic black vampire fiction, as represented by Jewelle Gomez’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewelle_Gomez") novel The Gilda Stories, as well as by the series African Immortals by Tananarive Due (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tananarive_Due") and The Vampire Huntress Legend (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampire_Huntress_Legend_Series") by Leslie Esdaile Banks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Esdaile_Banks").

The construction of race
Some critics view Butler’s decision to endow her protagonist with a larger dose of melanin than what is normal for the Ina as a metaphor for how the concept of race is created. Ali Brox, for example, points out that Shori is not just "made black" biologically, but also socially when Ina fixate on her difference. Thus, Shori’s skin color forces her to defend herself from a hostile world before she has even learned about institutionalized hierarchies.

Ina bias against humans also serves as a comment on the history of human bigotry, specifically the prejudices of whites against blacks. As Sanchez-Taylor explains, “[t]he displacement of the notion of race into a species conflict allows Butler to have a black protagonist and have a discussion of intolerance without the need to partake in the history of human racism.” In Fledgling, this racial discussion takes on a hopeful tone when the majority of the Ina acknowledge Shori as one of their own.

Additionally, endowing Shori with a specific racial identity serves to deconstruct negative stereotypes of blackness. As a black protagonist, she becomes the vehicle through which Butler articulates the lack of Black in the vampire genre and challenges traditional notions of white males as heroes. Moreover, because her blackness was conceived as an evolutionary advantage, it inverts racist notions of blackness as a biological contaminant that leads to degeneracy.

Speciesism as an allegory of racism
Several scholars have noted how Ina discrimination against Shori doubles as commentary on human racist practices. According to Steven Shaviro, racism is the major factor in the conflict between Shori and Ina speciesists such as the Silk family, who view humans as enemies who have annihilated Ina throughout history. These Ina maintain that Ina and human must remain separate species with the Ina as the dominant partner. They consider Shori to be somehow biologically different to the rest of the Ina population, as not even belonging to the same species as them. They refuse to see the shared characteristics between Shori and the rest of the Ina; instead, they deride her because of her difference.

What rewrites these Ina's speciesism as racism, according to Shaviro, is that the genes that make Shori “part human” are also the genes that make her black, as opposed to their “almost grotesquely albino” skin tone. In fact, as Shari Evans notes, the racial insult Russell Silk hurls at Shori during the Council of Judgment (“murdering black mongrel bitch”) negates the Ina’s avowed difference from human prejudice and instead evoke white supremacy. These human-hating Ina, therefore, commit the equivalent of a hate-crime by destroying all of Shori’s family, fueled by an ideology of racial purity and superiority that is not much different than that of Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. As Ali Brox explains, Shori’s hybridity becomes the focus of their hatred because it exposes the falsity of their claims to purity and reminds them of their past abject condition at the hands of humans.