Take root among the stars? Emancipatory homemaking as critical worldbuilding in Octavia Butler’s Parables

Abstract

This paper draws on geographical literature on home to explore two strategies of emancipatory homemaking in the Science Fiction novels of Octavia Butler. It examines, homemaking as a strategy, first, of persistence and, second, of adaptability. Analyzing these two strategies in the way they combine, we argue, allows us to define the home as a critical place that links various geographical scales, from the most intimate to the planetary. We build our argument by tracing the ways in which the protagonists of Butler’s Parables build homes in respect of a necessary negotation between persistance vis-a-vis violence and threats on the one, and the necessity to adapt to the precarious social institutions that surround them on the other hand. Such critical, multiscalar geography of home is proposed as a middle ground between extraterrestrial escapist tendencies, and the introvert isolationism of the homely enclave. Butler’s novels help critical geographers frame the paradoxical space of the home as a productive tension: Home is as much a place of loss, instability, and uncertainty as it is a locus of political agency, counteracting violence and liberating (inter)subjective kinship.