This essay argues that the child—especially the unborn child that is all potential—has a notably figurative function in the Black literary imagination of the 1970s. The child shifts the emphasis from an ideal nationalist subject (or the aspiration to be such) toward the interactions and ethics of care work. This shift is explored in the novel form, so this essay turns to James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). As these novels reveal, in a reactionary era when the emergence of neoliberal governance intensified the vulnerability of Black life, the child occasioned literary exploration of care—waged, unpaid, invisible, delegitimated, cross-gendered labor that has sustained Black lives for generations. On such an occasion, the child has a Janus-faced function. From the standpoint of an uncaring present, the child prompts a glance into the life-sustaining practices of the past, while it invites speculation over what future practices could be.As the conduit among imagined states of time, the child exhibits an unspoken interest in reimagining temporal movement—beyond nationalism’s progressive linearity—in an era of disillusionment.

In this article, I begin with a broad question for anthropological philosophy—what is the human?—to turn toward a related question for social analysis: How did the concept of gender become a constitutive part of being human? Octavia Butler's speculative historical novel, Wild Seed (1980), troubles gender's conceptual metaphysics, serving as a precursor for the exploration of an alternative humanism found in Sylvia Wynter's “Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground' of Caliban's ‘Woman’” (1990). By anticipating Wynter's reading of Caliban and his missing, desired “woman,” Butler inverts the demonic grounds of negated progeny, reproduction, and patriarchal authority. In addition to speculating about the ontology of racialized femaleness, Wild Seed situates embodied maleness as an equal ontological problem. While Caliban is overly embodied, lacking patriarchal masculinity and its reproductive trappings, Wild Seed reintroduces the ontological problem of genderless embodiment through the native's/African's masculinity. Butler explores unthinkable human existence through the question of how gender pairs became a constitutive aspect of the human, rather than by focusing on one half of a gender binary over another. “(In)humanism” is conceptually provisional, intended to illustrate the transitional reason that underlies both formation and disappearance of what counts as humanness.

This article argues that the vampire is the metaphorical vehicle for literary representations of “oceanic lifespans,” or lived temporalities that derive from liberal humanist dispossession. Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) are vampire novels that interrupt conventional narratives about temporality—which include historical time, chronological time, and national time—to explore oceanic narratives, such as the artificial time of adulthood or the immortal time of girlhood. Through such an interruption, the vampires that Gomez and Butler invent explore alternatively nonhegemonic versions of what living history means.

Accounts for the term’s shifting definitions and relevance for the field of African American studies.

An essay-review of three recent studies that read how mixed racialism expresses and challenges the terms of US nationalism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.