Earticle

This paper examines the political significance of communal relationship depicted in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. By imagining various forms of communal relationship as an alternative to individualistic solution, the novel goes against the grain of individualism as a national tenet throughout American literature and offers a new way of envisioning the national community. In doing so, Butler tries to show that individualism is not an end in itself as many novels have claimed, but rather an effective instrument to successfully make an collective community. By showing that Shori’s individual ability as an American Adam is an quintessential element in nurturing communities and making them thrive, the novel indicates that individual values and communal ideals can be complementary and “symbiotic” to each other.

This study examines the emergence of an ethical community and Shori’s transformation into an ethical subject by focusing on her amnesia and the reproductive condition. Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of reproduction, this paper argues that the reproductive impossibility between the Ina and their human symbionts serves as the basis for creating new forms of community. It then examines the connections among objects that enable the emergence of ethical community by drawing on the concepts of the new materialist machine ontology. This approach aims to demonstrate that the formation of ethical subjects and communities, as well as their practical potential, is grounded in material relations rather than abstract ideas. This paper further examines the reversal whereby humans become objects of consumption for vampires. Through this reversal, it argues that an ethical community emerges only within a dynamic relational assemblage that enables the mutual survival and enhancement of capacities. When blood consumption and contagion are rethought as forms of biological machinic connections, ethics is no longer understood as a transcendent or one-sided concern for the other. Rather, it is understood as an immanent relational practice through which symbiotic beings sustain one another’s survival and ongoing becoming.

This paper examines the sexual and racial other depicted in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. The protagonist of the story is Shori, a non-traditional vampire figure. The novel begins with Shori injured and suffering from amnesia. She discovers that her family used a black woman’s DNA to genetically reengineer her as part vampire and part human. As a black interspecies subject, Shori symbolizes the potential subversion of dominant ideology. Shori and her family are attacked by someone, and she is rejected as foreign and denied minority status among a group of white vampires. Other Ina vampires oppose her mixed-blood status. Mainstream vampire groups try to maintain perfect unity by rejecting the otherness in order to preserve their collective identifications and identities. Shori is recreated as an abject being and abandoned outside the border. By comparing a vampire to a hateful other in this narrative, Butler analogizes the history of racism in America and talks about the strong differences and boundaries that still exist. Eventually, Shori establishes her own identity and creates a new vampire history and culture.

A five-month-old African grey parrot was presented with alopecia, yellowish diarrhea, depression, and paralysis in the veterinary medical center, Chungbuk National University. The patient died 3 h later after hospitalization. For the accurate diagnosis, necropsy was performed and fungi were detected in the air sac. PCR was done for the viral detection which caused the alopecia, and for the species identification of fungi. Final diagnosis was a multi infection with avian circoviruses that caused psittacine beak and feather disease (PBFD), avian polyomavirus cause budgerigar fledgling disease (BFD), and Aspergillus fumigatus. This is the first report of a multi infection in South Korea.

This paper examines the political significance of communal relationship depicted in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. By imagining various forms of communal relationship as an alternative to individualistic solution, the novel goes against the grain of individualism as a national tenet throughout American literature and offers a new way of envisioning the national community. In doing so, Butler tries to show that individualism is not an end in itself as many novels have claimed, but rather an effective instrument to successfully make an collective community. By showing that Shori’s individual ability as an American Adam is an quintessential element in nurturing communities and making them thrive, the novel indicates that individual values and communal ideals can be complementary and “symbiotic” to each other.