Parables of resilience: Promising pessimism, Octavia Butler's ‘purpose’, and the making of worlds

Abstract

Resilience is the trailblazing saviour of contemporary social and political life. Politicians, scientists, self-help experts, public school administrators, military officials, and psychologists increasingly tout resilience-building as the only rational solution to a twenty-first-century world of unprecedented uncertainty. The underlying (pessimistic) promise of resilience is that people, and by extension global systems, can not only survive but flourish through crisis. In order to underscore the material, ideological and political danger that this logic poses, I examine NASA/SpaceX's plans for interplanetary colonisation – a project explicitly intended to promote a resilient human species – as promising pessimism's devastating finale. Despite this dire trajectory, I conclude by considering the cost for left feminist thinkers and activists of reducing the concept of resilience to a neoliberal technology of power. To this end, I contend that Octavia Butler's prophetic diptych Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) counters the colonising project of promising pessimism and recovers a liberatory account of resilience: one which refuses to exchange utopian surety for acquiescence to power, but which recuperates the present as a practice ground for transformation. Ultimately, this article insists that to engage in political struggle over how to govern ourselves and our world, in a shared context of escalating crises, requires sustained critical investment in the ethical and political implications of valorising certain kinds of resilient life.