The Somatopic Black Female Body within Archipelagic Space and Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed

Abstract

Hamilton uses Ramona Fernandez’s idea of the “somatope,” which expands upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope,” and Elaine Stratford et al.’s concept of the archipelago to bridge the gap between the somatopic black body of Anyanwu, the co-protagonist of Butler’s Wild Seed, and archipelagic spatiality. According to Hamilton, archipelagic studies allows us to think through the various kinds of relations Anyanwu’s black somatopic body might have, maintains the body’s relationship to consciousness, history, and subjectivity, and goes beyond linear and binary relationships, so we can get at the political implications of a “raced spatiotemporality.” The significance of reading Wild Seed through an archipelagic model, Hamilton concludes, is that it allows us to engage American literature and history from a black feminist perspective.