Octavia E. Butler and Black Women's Archives at the End of the World

Abstract

This essay argues for the critical importance of archives and archive-building in the life and work of Octavia E. Butler in the face of both real-world and imaginative narratives of apocalypse and species suicide. I read Butler's Parable series and selected archival texts combining a Derridean understanding of the archive as both a “shelter” and an “authority”—an ongoing and unruly process as much as an object of study—and black feminist theory that imagines a “home place” for preserving authorial voice and agency. I read archival practice as central to the new generic term “visionary fiction” since it provides black women writers in particular a space to record their lives and voices in deliberate ways that allow different political and ontological possibilities for the future. Butler's archive is vital to understanding her work.