Violent and Vibrant Kinship in N.K. Jemisin ed. by Berit Åström and Jenny Bonnevier (review)

Reviewed by: Violent and Vibrant Kinship in N. K. Jemisined. by Berit Åström and Jenny Bonnevier Sarah Leilani Parijs Violent and Vibrant Kinship in N. K. Jemisin. Berit Åström and Jenny Bonnevier, eds. Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance. Lexington, 2023. 214 pp. 95 hc, 45 ebk. N. K. Jemisin's award-winning work has made an indelible mark on sf studies. Her socio-environmental worlds under threat blend sf and fantasy tropes to navigate and critique systemic oppression associated with race, gender, sex, and class. Her work investigates our own fraught worlds and ways of being together, speaking to the precarity of socio-environmental futures; it also interrogates how we renegotiate the ethics, conventions, and potentiality of estrangement in sf versus fantasy. In Kinship in the Fiction of N. K. Jemisin, Berit Åström and Jenny Bonnevier situate their collection in sf studies but read Jemisin as more than just an sf writer. They use "speculative fiction" to read Jemisin's work as an open-ended rethinking of cultural "genre definitions, borders, genealogies, and hierarchies" (2). They also locate their work in kinship studies critically to rethink Western genealogical affiliations and power structures. Thematically uniting the essays is the idea that "kinship can and does hurt its members" (13). The collection argues that Jemisin's speculative fiction challenges traditional misogynistic, Eurocentric, heterosexual, racist, and humanist worldviews by reimagining nonnormative forms of kinship. "Part I: Kinship and Agency" explores the violent structures undergirding kinship and the nuclear family. Jenny Bonnevier's "Kinship Matters: Bodies and Power in N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy" opens by clarifying the stakes of kinship as a social and familial organization. As the only essay not exploring Jemisin's B rokenE arthfiction (2015-2017), this chapter argues that in the I nheritancetrilogy (2010-2011) genealogical kinship and coercive state power coalesce through bodies and biological matter. Bonnevier contends that Jemisin challenges epic fantasy's reliance on "discourses of descent and bloodlines" through the first novel's protagonist Yeine (29). For Bonnevier, End Page 98Yeine's refusal of her marginalized role as sacrifice and surrogate mother for a reborn deity uses speculative tropes to illustrate the agential porosity of matter working against the dictates of blood. For example, she reads discursive kinship in blood sigils rather than chattel servitude. Yet she suggests that interactive biological matter—skin and blood itself—is "a source of resistance and power" in the series (37). Ultimately, Bonnevier's analysis of bodies and blood rearticulates kinship as a transformative materiality. The next two essays in the section critique normative parental roles. Alexandra Stamson and Jennifer Ash's "Narcissist Fathers and Powered Daughters" analyzes the second protagonist of The Obelisk Gate (2016), Nassun, and her abusive relationship with her father, Jiga. Stamson and Ash read the novel as a speculative case study of how gendered patriarchal systems exacerbate violent relations between narcissistic fathers and the children forced to survive them. They track Nassun's abusive relationship with Jiga, from his possessive denial of her individuality to her empowering separation. As Nassun masters orogeny (a form of magical connection with nature in the series), Stamson and Ash suggest that "she is able to flourish in her individual power" by severing herself from Jiga and setting her own boundaries (57). While sf genre tropes are often unexplored in the essay, they emphasize speculative fiction as an empowering way to find personal clarity and strength. In "Motherhood in N. K. Jemisin's B rokenE arthNovels, " Berit Åström argues that the trilogy's main character Essun challenges and extends beyond the gendered, Eurocentric role of the mother as loving and self-sacrificing. Her essay complicates normalized views of mothers, especially Black mothers, by tracing the uncanny familiarity of familial and community structures in the series. For example, Åström reads the Fulcrum society as an sf metaphor for pronatalist societies by showing how Essun's pregnancies are "all thrust upon her" (67) as reproductive labor. Essun, in comparison, remains ambivalent about motherhood even as she loves her children, which complicates and counters the Western mother figure. To Åström. . .