Octavia E. Butler

This short piece explores the social and situated practices of collectively negotiating speculative fiction over video conferencing software across different time zones. It builds on recent calls for a reinvigorated cultural sociology of reading that is attentive to how ‘the very exposure through fictional texts to the plurality of the human condition, its vulnerability and its strengths, opens up for readers the possibility of conceiving and making sense of change in themselves and their situation’ (Thumala Olave, 2018: 449). Through an attentiveness to the knowledge production of readers, it is a modest addition to recent work which seeks to explore the relationship between speculative climate fiction and political change (Milkoreit 2016; Schneider-Mayerson, 2018; Harris, 2020; Yazell 2020). In exploring how readers seek out and engage with utopian and critically dystopian fictions that nourish the capacity for individual and collective resistance and struggle, this piece - and the wider project it is part of - seeks to ground some of the claims made by science fiction scholars, about the radical potential of sf (see Moylan, 2000, Jameson, 2005) by attending qualitatively to ordinary reading practices. I cautiously suggest that this creative, collaborative, caring sf reading practice constitutes a form of ambiguously hopeful sustenance. It builds on recent research with online sf reading communities which is interested in how reading and discussing speculative fiction online is generative for collectively negotiating radically altered presents and futures (see Chambers and Garforth, 2020; Iossifidis 2018 a, b and Iossifiids and Garforth, forthcoming).

In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la lettre, prefiguring problems we are perhaps only now in a position to address academically. In other words, if both current scientific and philosophical conceptions of life attest that beings are always already co-constituted by their surroundings, we can no longer rely on a model of subjectivity and personhood that presupposes clear, bounded individuation. Before the popularization of affect theory and new materialism, Octavia E. Butler’s hyperempathy—a condition causing possessors to have an embodied response to visual perception of others’ emotions—provides a speculation on the consequences of the felt, interconnectivity of beings that “sympoiesis” characterizes. Against assumptions that interconnectivity necessarily precipitates more ethical modes of being in the world, Butler challenges static claims about shared substance and experience by providing a more complex depiction of what it means to feel as others do. I argue that Butler’s presentation of hyperempathy demonstrates that sharing experience is not a panacea for human and non-human relations but a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension.

The essay draws on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire to examine the role of memory in moments of liberation and their potential intervention in the development of new cultural structures. In Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Anyanwu functions as a lieu de mémoire that defies historical amnesia, acting as a voice of resistance to Mary’s recreation of Doro’s colonial forces in a post-colonial context. Anyanwu’s represents both a connection to the past and the potential for liberation from these structures of domination at a critical moment in the creation of a new governing system.

Desde priscas eras com o povo Sumeriano e sua mítica terra de Dilmum descrita no poema épico de Gilgamesh (2000 a.C.), passando pelo ideal político descrito por Platão em A República (367 a.C.) e desembocando em ficções como A Ilha (1962) de Aldous Huxley, a idealização de um lugar onde a paz, prosperidade e justiça reinam tem sido um traço recorrente da história da humanidade. Tanto em forma de idéias religiosas e filosóficas quanto projetos literários-políticos, a persistência da imaginação utópica sugere que o ser humano anseia por um mundo perfeito que difira radicalmente do modelo imperfeito vivenciado diariamente. Todavia, como a história ocasionalmente mostra, na tentativa de ser implantado o sonho utópico revela que, como qualquer outra manifestação humana, ele também tem um lado negro representado pela pesadélica distopia. Através dos séculos a literatura tem refletido o otimismo das utopias; no entanto, a gradual e crescente prevalência do ceticismo e pessimismo das distopias tem se evidenciado desde o final do século XIX e durante o século XX. Nesse longo processo, tornou-se evidente a influência de um elemento que marca presença tanto nas utopias como nas distopias, sejam essas literárias, políticas ou religiosas: o pensamento científico. Como resultado dessa influência, dois pontos são observados em ambas as formas de ficção: primeiro, a similaridade estrutural entre elas e o gênero literário que tem a ciência como seu leitmotiv: a ficção científica. Segundo, a prevalência nessas obras de um discurso eurocêntrico e masculino cuja ideologia silenciou mulheres e grupos minoritários de forma geral por muitos séculos. Desde os anos 60, porém, essa ideologia tem sido confrontada por diferentes estratégias literárias que discutem temas relacionados à problemática de raça, gênero, sexualidade, e linguagem nas obras de ficção científica de escritores como Samuel R., entre outros. Nas distopias ficcionais, especialmente naquelas escritas por mulheres, tais estratégias se formalizam na criação de contra-narrativas utópicas que, por se oporem à hegemonia do discurso distópico dominante, foram definidas por Lyman Tower Sargent, Raffaella Baccolini e Tom Moylan como 'distopias críticas'. Visando demonstrar como a construção dessa contra-narrativa utópica subverte e renova as convenções da distopia, esta dissertação irá focar nos romances A História da Aia (1985), da canadense Margaret Atwood, e Parable of the Sower (1993) da afro-americana Octavia E. Butler.

Most scholarship that addresses Octavia E. Butler's 1979 novel Kindred focuses on its value as a forerunner of the neo-slave narrative in African-American literature, and thus the manner in which traces of the past affect the protagonist's present in the novel. However, given Butler's established fixation with the future, I contend that one may also read Kindred from a futurist perspective. I find that Butler's vision of the future in this novel is pessimistic because the protagonist fails to resist the white, patriarchal authority perpetuated in patrilinear time in a definitive manner, so that the liberatory trajectory of the novel ultimately fails. Because of this, Butler's pessimistic vision of the future is one in which racism and sexism may well continue to haunt African-American experience.

One way of understanding calls for “multispecies justice” is to interpret them as utopian demands for a desirable future in which the structural anthropocentrism of conventional forms of morality, including environmental ethics, has been thoroughly abolished. I hope to clarify what kind of utopia multispecies justice might specifically entail. Mobilizing a conceptual framework developed by the science fiction author Octavia Butler, three potential plotlines for the utopia of multispecies justice are identified: the What-If, the If-Only and the If-This-Goes-On. Each of these engages the various tasks of utopianism in interestingly different ways. The key argument is that multispecies justice primarily raises a challenging What-If question: as a critical interrogation of how we should process and experience the world (and our place within it), its power derives from the “educated hope” to disrupt and reassemble outdated frameworks for making sense of the nature/culture divide.

The 20th century demonstrated that the realization of utopian plans often fosters totalitarianism. Fantastic, speculative literature mirrored this by turning from utopia to dystopia. In the hopeful 1970s, critical utopian texts revived the hope for a better world in a more complex fashion that replaced perfectionism with ambiguity and self-reflection. But neo- liberalism prevailed and other utopian hopes declined again. But a new kind of utopian text emerged in the 1980s and 1990s: the critical dystopia. Novels like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Gold Coast (1988), Marge Piercy’s He, She and It (1991), and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) depict horrible capitalist dystopian societies that almost crush the emancipatory hopes of resistance groups. But their utopian desire is not completely futile. This glimpse of hope also characterizes ambiguously utopian science fiction texts of the new millennium, e.g. Chris Carlsson’s After the Deluge(2004), Neal Stephenson’s Anathem(2008), and Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts (2014).
Le XXe siècle a montré que la réalisation des programmes utopiques nourrit fréquemment le totalitarisme. La littérature fantastique et spéculative a reflété cette tendance en passant de l’utopie à la dystopie. Dans l’enthousiasme caractéristique des années 1970, des textes utopiques critiques ranimèrent l’espoir d’un monde meilleur dans le cadre d’une approche plus complexe qui substituait l’ambiguïté et l’introspection au perfectionnisme utopique. Mais la domination du néo-libéralisme a emporté les espoirs renouvelés de l’utopie. Cependant, une nouvelle variété utopique vit le jour dans les années 1980 et 1990 : la dystopie critique. Des romans comme The Gold Coast (1988) de Kim Stanley Robinson, He, She and It de Marge Piercy (1991) ou encore The Parable of the Sower d’Octavia E. Butler décrivent d’horribles sociétés capitalistes dystopiques qui anéantissent presque les espoirs d’émancipation des groupes de résistants. Mais leur désir d’utopie n’est pas réduit à la futilité. C’est cette lueur d’espoir qui caractérise aussi de façon ambiguë des textes de science fiction utopique du nouveau millénaire comme After the Deluge de Chris Carlsson (2004), Anathem de Neal Stevenson (2008) et A Country of Ghosts de Margaret Killjoy (2014).

Predatory lending of subprime mortgages targeting the most economically vulnerable minority communities helped trigger the current global financial crisis. This special issue of the journal American Quarterly explores the ways in which "subprime" becomes a racial signifier in the current debate about the causes and fixes for a capitalism itself in crisis. It signifies both the accumulated dispossession of racial exclusion in the twenty-first century gilded age in the United States and Global North more broadly, as well as the imperial ambitions of three decades of U.S.-led neoliberal rule over the Global South. Essays are divided into sections: debt, discipline, and empire; the pathologies of debt; and security, space, and resistance in the post-racial urban setting. Focusing on race and empire, that is, on racial and global subjugation, the contributors expose the ethical-political underpinnings of the current global financial crisis. Contributors include: Radhika Balakri...

The following conversation took place via email over a series of weeks between Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, and Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao. After meeting on a panel at the IAS on 6 February 2019, Ama and Xine have become friends, correspondents, collaborators, and allies. This conversation on the work of the incredible Octavia Butler is a minuscule window through which to view a fraction of the wonderful, weird, empowering, and inflammatory challenges/corroborations that have since taken place.

While literacy may have signified the humanity of male slaves in the antebellum South (at least in their own view), the English language and American print culture did not similarly empower female slaves towards positive subject-formation through discourse. This article will examine the tension between oral culture and print culture in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Ultimately, an analysis of Jacobs’s work through the lens of book history and its power to shape cultural formation will suggest a critical imperative for the contemporary neo-slave narrative genre.

Accordingly, the agency of contemporary neo-slave writers serves as a foil to the problematized authority granted to our literary foremothers, and in many ways redeems the emancipatory potential of the written word. This essay argues that neo-slave narratives, as part of the continuum of slave narratives, attempt to resolve or deconstruct the dualistic myths of Western epistemology and through interaction with speculative tropes, offer a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and healing for the postmodern African American subject. The manipulation of language serves different ends in the neo-slave narrative than it does in its precursor, but by exploring the breakdown of mind/body dualism, challenging the hierarchy of oral and print cultures, and interrogating the slave’s act of refusal across both works, we make visible the ways that neo-slave narratives build upon antebellum slave narratives and ultimately position us to find generative uses for our traumatic past.

V diplomskem delu sem se posvetila ameriški feministični znanstveni fantastiki, predvsem motivu spolne dvoumnosti (in ne interseksualnosti, kot piše v naslovu) v romanih Joanne Russ, Octavie E. Butler, Ursule K. Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Theodorja Sturgeona in Samuela R. Delanyja. Razpravljala sem o njihovih političnih in teoretskih izhodiščih ter pripovednih postopkih, s katerimi so konec šestdesetih in v začetku sedemdesetih let 20. stoletja izpodbijali samoumevnost heteronormativnosti in spolnega binarizma. Delo preučuje besedilne strategije, ki jih manjšinski subjekti v  teh delih uporabljajo za proliferacijo spolov in izrekanje svoje drugosti v odnosu do dvospolnega reda. Ob tem obravnava tudi esencializem in biologizem tistih feminističnih literarnih teorij, ki so pred vznikom queer teorije določale razumevanje feministične znanstvene fantastike kot specifičnega literarnega žanra.

Entering the discussion of the current political climate as a possible “Third Reconstruction,” this article reads Octavia E. Butler’s recent New York Times bestselling novel, Parable of the Sower, to re-center the fugitive politics that brought about the first Reconstruction in the long struggle for Black liberation and engender what I am calling an abolitionist politics of self-care. Butler’s main character, Lauren Oya Olamina, operates as literary archive that brings together an initial canon of Black feminist intellectual visionaries, each of whom contributed to the long project of Reconstruction, and provides tangible practices for abolition democracy steeped in an attentiveness to interdependence and sustainability, all ecological, emotional, and political.

The Octavia E. Butler Collection contains thousands of items from Butler’s life and career housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, including some letters written between Toni Cade Bambara and Octavia E. Butler in the 1980s. The letters are at once private correspondence between trusted friends and womanist praxis.

Based on the concept of postcolonial literature
as the writing that investigates the literary
production of women and other minority
groups in relation to the colonial discourse, this
article aims to analyze how the Afro-American
writer Octavia E. Butler uses speculative fiction
to expose and subvert colonial discourse
through hybridism. First, it is discussed how
science and its biased attitude towards black
people became institutionalized in modern
Western culture. After this, the text examines
the influence of this ideology upon the science
fiction narrative. Finally, the article analyses
Butler’s creation of postcolonial identities in
the short story “Bloodchild” (1996) and in
the novel The Parable of the Sower (1993) as
a criticism of dominant representations of
gender and race.

Octavia Estelle Butler was certainly a paradox. For many years, a solitary black woman successfully writing in the predominantly white, male world of science fiction, she was a force to be reckoned with. She was also extremely shy and self-conscious in public, a self-confessed asocial hermit who had unwavering courage when writing and speaking about unpalatable issues concerning humanity: Butler’s personality was simultaneously interchangeable and habitual. Butler did not want to be labelled, and rightly so; she was too complex, her identity too fluid to not be anything other than her own construct. And whilst she undoubtedly and rightly incorporated into her writing her lived experience as a black woman from an economically deprived background struggling for empowerment in a patriarchal Eurocentric society, her priority was always the conveyance of her own uniquely constructed vision of humanity’s condition: survival is dependent, not on embodiment which can betray our true being, but on internal communion; the recognition of like-mindedness and the acceptance of change, even if, as in the case of her fictional characters, it means phenotypically. Fortunately, due to Butler’s willingness to discuss her work, there is a plethora of archived interviews providing insight into her own expectations of her writing. Of particular interest is what Butler’s terms her, ‘radio imagination ... the kind of imagination that hears’ (Francis, 2010, p.101), as I will argue that there are emergent patterns between her thinking processes and her interest in the parapsychological phenomena of telepathy. Although telepathy is a fitting motif in the Patternist series (1976 -1984) as a means of demonstrating the invisible, internal power struggles which, in turn, mirror society’s observable, hierarchal power relations, it is also significant in terms of narrative structure and devices. Because the medium of telepathy does not privilege visuality as is the case with most other forms of communication it immediately problematises embodiment and the construction of reality. The patterns from which reality is constructed, from the smallest atomic particle to the expanse of the known universe, neither of which are visible to the naked eye, feature heavily in Butler’s narratives, and it is for this reason that I decided to examine this particular series by applying what I consider to be an original approach: a philosophy which incorporates science, technology, and mystic religion, namely, Patternist philosophy. The premise underpinning Ben Goertzel’s (2006) philosophy is that ‘a mind is thus a collection of patterns that is associated with a persistent dynamical process that achieves highly-patterned goals in highly-patterned environments’ (Goertzel, 2015, p.1). Certainly, I would argue that this definition can be applied to Butler’s continual reworking of core themes throughout her career. This paper, the title of which incorporates Butler’s teenage fantasy of being able to live forever and breed people, will demonstrate how this personal fantasy is evident in the Patternist series and can be read within the theoretical framework of Goertzel’s Patternist philosophy.

This course offers collateral readings and discussions to the lecture series "The Coming Catastrophe". Throughout the 20th century, the threat of anthropogenic environmental collapse has been a concern for philosophers, cultural theorists and media scholars alike. In response to the alarming calls of climatologists and natural scientists, the tasks of epistemology, of theoretical reflection and of 'making sense' take on a different urgency. In conjunction with the weekly lectures, the course will serve as an introduction to related theoretical texts from the mid-20th century to today, including thinkers such as Günther Anders, Octavia E. Butler, Félix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Déborah Danowsky, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Kathryn Yusoff.

Este capítulo tem como objetivo analisar como a escritora Octavia E. Butler
promove uma releitura pós-moderna do tema do vampirismo em Fledgling
(2005) para criticar conceitos construídos e perpetuados historicamente pelo
discurso dominante no ocidente em relação à questão de gênero e raça. Dentre
outras vertentes romanescas, este discurso também se fez presente na literatura
gótica corrente nos séculos XVIII e XIX, na qual personagens femininas e/ou
oriundos de culturas marginais foram tradicionalmente representadas como
seres ora passiveis ora demonizados, moldando assim a postura dos leitores e,
principalmente, das leitoras da época diante de tais questões.