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Octavia Butler's last novel, Fledgling, offers a posthuman politics espousing the ideal of companion species. This politics is cast within a framework of biological citizenship and is contingent on a posthumanist biology that suggests multispecies membership. Butler's posthumanism is not the "intensification" of the human (as Cary Wolfe describes popular versions of posthumanism, Posthumanism xv) but rather a multispecies condition. "Posthumanism" here is a politico-philosophical discourse where the human/animal, human/ nonhuman, able-bodied/disabled body binaries-with their resultant structures of legitimized domination, oppression, and animal genocides- is rejected. Posthumanism sees the human abilities, qualities, consciousness, and features as evolving in conjunction with other life forms, technology, and ecosystems. As a result, posthumanism does not see the human as the center of all things: it sees the human as an instantiation of connections, linkages, and crossings in a context where species are seen as coevolving, and competition is rejected in favour of cooperation between life forms. Butler's novel explores the possibilities and potentiality of a biological life form that combines within it multiple species DNA, which can be acculturated-in the double sense of biological cultures as well as social mores-into something new, and where the sense of biological or cultural belonging is never restricted to one species.
Fledgling is the story of Shori Matthews, the sole, now amnesiac, survivor of a murderous attack on her family. Shori is an Ina-vampires that have coevolved with humans on earth for centuries. The Ina have been genetic experimenters, and Shori, a product of such an experiment, can tolerate sunlight. The Ina are "another species" that cannot "interbreed with humans" (67) and are humanity's "cousin species" (67). Shori, the vampire-human hybrid, is rescued by a man, Wright, who becomes physiologically and emotionally addicted to her when she bites him. Later, Shori moves into a community of Ina along with Wright and her other human "symbionts."1 A Council of Judgment of Ina families is summoned to sort out the thorny issue of Shori's family's massacre. During the Council Shori's symbiont, Theodora, is murdered. The Silk family, which is behind the attacks, argues for the purity of Ina blood and against genetic experiments such as Shori. The Council punishes the Silk family by taking away its unmated sons. The other Ina look forward to...