Octavia Butler Research Articles

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

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.

Understanding a Future Yet to Take Shape

An issue on narrating shared futures (‘How will we live together?’) implies being able to conceive of a mutual and shared experience. The history of shared heritages often contains other figures in the margins: those who were not seen as part of the dominant cultural narrative, or whose contribution to its heritage went unacknowledged. The holistic view of the 2018 Davos declaration on Baukultur embraces a more integral view of the built environment and society. In order to explore some of the cultural narratives that shape our past and envision a shared future, this article takes a closer look at three science fiction authors and how their stories draw lessons from the past into a narration of possible futures. Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood have each envisioned futures that draw from contemporary developments and expand them to an overarching logic as the setting of their tales. Rather than directly examining (un)built heritages, this article examines the underlying cultural logic of building on the past. If architecture provides a foundation for a shared (and inclusive) future, the stories constructed by these authors show how the built environment resonates with societal principles, aiding or hindering particular collective values.

Mobilizing Literature: Social Movements and Post-1945 US Literary Studies

Abstract: This essay proposes a movements-based method for studying the development of US literature after World War II. It argues that the cultural materialist and institutionalist frameworks that have dominated post-1945 US literary studies in recent years have systematically overlooked the role of social movements as catalysts for cultural change. Through readings of the literary magazine n+1, the archival materials of Octavia Butler, and novels by a range of other major postwar US authors, it offers an account of how the collective mobilizations of the past sixty years—from Civil Rights, the New Left, and the Women's Movement to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo—have decisively shifted the contours of the US literary field.

“What is the truth?:” On teaching paradoxes, race, family, and the self with Octavia Butler’s Kindred

This article investigates the pedagogical power of teaching and learning alongside Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I examine the stories of students enrolled in a special topics undergraduate honors seminar centered on personal discovery, race, and family using grounded theory and narrative textual analysis. Students’ narratives reveal the ways Kindred and science fiction more generally offer opportunities for substantive culturally disruptive pedagogy (San Pedro, 2018) through sustained engagement with the mechanics of time travel, contending with impossible choices, and wrestling with contradictions and paradoxes. Learning from this course demonstrates the usefulness of Black feminist speculative pedagogy for building students’ capacity for naming what is (Ohman, 2021) and by extension disrupting and confronting the historical and contemporary legacies of racism and heteropatriarchy.

The Next Word: A Framework for Imagining the Benefits and Harms of Generative AI as a Resource for Learning to Write

AbstractIn Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993) wrote: “Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware” (p. 116). In this paper, we apply this command to a speculative examination of the consequences of text‐based generative AI (GAI) for adolescent writers, framing this examination within a socially situated “Writers‐in‐Community” model of writing (Graham, 2018), which considers writing as both an act of individual cognition and as situated within concentric circles representing nested social, material, and cultural contexts for writing. Through the lens of this model, we discuss representations of language‐related technologies in works by several well‐known authors of 20th‐century speculative fiction and contrast these speculative scenarios with examples from our recent research into student writers' use of ChatGPT and other GAI tools. Finally, we discuss (a) the limitations of these tools as lacking the ability to set goals and use these goals to compose a written work, which is a key component of an effective writing process and (b) what would be required to supporting students to write agentively in collaboration with these tools, despite these limitations. This discussion focuses on three principles: (1) centering human writers in collaborations with GAI; (2) setting writer goals to address historical, political, institutional, and social influences; and (3) critical agency in literacy with GAI.

The Aesthetics of Social Reproduction: Silences in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

Abstract: This essay interprets novels by Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler as the authors engage with social reproduction theory, a field concerned with the relationship between productive labor—"value"-producing work, such as that of the factory—and reproductive labor (or so-called women's work), including housework. Charting the impact of Tillie Olsen's essay "Silences in Literature," the essay argues that subsequent authors of the 1980s and 1990s adapted Olsen's concept of silences to their own purposes. What was originally a mode of interpreting the missing contributions of women to literary history became for later writers an invitation to think about lapses as an aesthetic strategy. In The Handmaid's Tale and Parable of the Sower , Atwood and Butler reimagined Olsen's silences as developing a "trope of inarticulacy," a technique by which narrators insert gaps or occlusions in place of conveying events such as sex, pregnancy, or care work. The essay concludes that such a trope is the means by which these authors repeat the procedure that subordinates women's work to waged labor.

Unveiling Otherness: Gendered Memories and Identity in Octavia Butler's Dawn

In recent years, American Studies have shifted their focus towards the political realm. However, despite the undermining of many moral-philosophical dogmas of the Western metaphysical tradition by poststructuralism and deconstruction, a significant portion of the political claims made in this revisionist turn still rely, albeit tacitly, on these moral and ethical assumptions. As these assumptions often clash with the theoretical foundations of revisionist works, some proponents resort to what could be termed as the "pathos of marginality" and rely on vague concepts of "otherness." Furthermore, these political-ideological interpretations often neglect aesthetic aspects, suspecting them of carrying implicit and hegemonic strategies of representation. This abstract delves into the exploration of gendered memories and identity within Octavia Butler's seminal work, Dawn. The narrative unfolds in a world fundamentally transformed by alien intervention, where the protagonist, Lilith, grapples with the complexities of her own identity amidst encounters with enigmatic extraterrestrial beings. Through an analysis of key characters and narrative themes, this study elucidates the nuanced portrayal of otherness and the role of gendered memories in shaping individual and collective identities. Butler's visionary narrative offers a thought-provoking examination of the intersections between memory, gender, and the construction of the self in a post-apocalyptic world. By delving into the philosophical underpinnings and ethical implications of otherness, this research aims to shed light on the intricate dynamics of identity formation and the quest for belonging in speculative fiction.

Octavia Butler's Bloodchild and the Posthuman Complexities: A Process of Becoming

This paper examines the human-nonhuman relationship for co-reproduction and co-existence between two species in Octavia Butler's speculative fiction "Bloodchild". The humans called the Terrans and the aliens called the Tlics make a contract for reciprocity to save the futurity of both. This research analyzes Butler's speculation of some posthuman complexities related to identity, gender, reproduction and forceful bonding in the far future. The multifaceted female protagonist T'Gatoi, the male human surrogacy, non-normative pregnancy and experimental birth foreground the horror of dystopian future that Butler attempts to make humans aware of. Based primarily on the textual evidence, the paper uses Donna Haraway's concept of "speculative feminism", Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming" and Rosi Braidotti's theory of critical posthumanities to argue for the author's warning to humanity against futuristic crises and call for a critical thought exercise to retrospect on human tyranny, egotism and sense of otherness. It proposes that overcoming the anthropocentric rule over nature and the "others" for the sake of natural equilibrium and socio-cultural harmony can help instill collective consciousness and promote community building to save this planet and the others for a sustainable future.

For a Psychoanalysis of the Flesh

This essay takes the notion of “flesh” as the point of departure for exploring the viability and contemporary relevance of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “ontological psychoanalysis”. Primary interlocutors will be Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Hortense Spillers’s essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”.

Beyond A New World in Space: Critical Astral Frontiers in Octavia Butler and Adam Garnet Jones

This paper explores two contemporary literary visions of space settlement to gauge their potential within an emancipatory feminist and antiracist imaginary of the future. In doing so, it engages with the broader question of whether literary interplanetary dreams are necessarily tied up in a colonial rhetoric of violent expansion, or if they can also be organized to serve the interests of oppressed and underserved groups in an Anthropocene context. The text examines and compares two recent narratives of space settlement, the one found in Octavia Butler’s ‘Earthseed’ series and Adam Garnet Jones’ short story ‘History of the New World.’ Based on a comparative close reading of both, this paper argues that both stories frame the project of resettling in space as a hopeful alternative to life within a collapsed natural world and the precarious socio-political framework that has arisen from it, albeit with distinctly different outcomes. This comparison focuses specifically on the organization of such utopian extraplanetary societies and the roles they fulfill in the present. Crucially, this paper considers how both stories evaluate the possibility of choosing not to leave for the astral frontier.

Educational futures and social justice

This paper considers educational futures from the perspective of social justice. It takes as its framework futures studies, which looks at what is probable (what is likely to happen), what is possible (what could happen), and what is preferable (what we would like to see/make happen). It also makes the case for science fiction as a method of inquiry, arguing that science fiction is a useful method for determining what we think we might (or might not) want futures to look like, as well as where we think we are now. Science fiction, the paper argues, is as much about our anxieties about the present and where we might be headed as it is about any sort of futures we may ultimately arrive at. The paper draws from the works of well-known science fiction authors of color (WEB DuBois, Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin) as well as from lesser-known science fiction authors writing from American Indian, Latino/a/X, and LGBTQIA + communities. In so doing, the paper explores how science fiction has infiltrated the social imagination and how it leads to paths both dystopian (à la Elon Musk) and liberating (such as Afrofuturism). It concludes with examples of the probable, the possible, and the preferable in educational futures, drawing from contemporary science fiction stories centered on social justice.

Creation Stories: Reproductive Crisis and the “Birth / Abortive” of Science Fiction

ABSTRACT This essay develops a genealogy of feminist science fiction as a revisionary reckoning with the enduring influence of patriarchal creation stories. Situating my reading practice in relation to the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, I consider scenes in Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Lilith’s Brood in which characters negotiate fraught reproductive choices with acts of speculative story-telling. The allegorical embodiments of reproductive crisis, I argue, are monstrous, inscrutable figures—John Milton’s Chaos, Mary Shelley’s creature, and Octavia Butler’s Oankali-human hybrids—who stand for inherited violence but also the “abortive” potential of reproduction gone awry.

Medieval Futures and the Postwork Romance

Abstract: This essay explores speculative resources in the premodern past as displayed in some contemporary anglophone fiction, with a focus on novels by Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood. Among its retrievals, speculative medievalism offers a critical vantage point on ruinous, "neofeudal" futures by fashioning a form of romance narrative centered on workers. The late-fourteenth century English poem Piers Plowman is looked to as a premodern speculative precursor and interlocutor for such versions of the medieval past.

The Uncanny Poetics of Capitalocene Meat: Carnologistics and Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’

The Uncanny Poetics of Capitalocene Meat: Carnologistics and Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as the Pyro Epidemic Novel

Drug addiction is one of the major social evils. A large number of people, irrespective of their age are falling prey to drugs because of various factors. Many works have been written on the substance abuse and their resultant crimes. The Crack Epidemic of the United States remains one of the major incidents related to drug consumption and addiction in the nation’s history. Octavia Estelle Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower deals with drug addiction as one of its sub-themes in the future Earth. Parable of the Sower is widely acknowledged because of its relevance in today’s time. Butler presents a dystopic future where environmental and climactic changes wreak havoc in the lives of people. In addition to this, the humans butcher each other because of the addiction of pyro drug, which makes them enjoy fire literally. The aim of this paper is to analyze Butler’s Parable of the Sower as the pyro epidemic novel, which highly resembles the crack epidemic of the United States in the later part of the twentieth century.

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

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.

An Analysis of Humanimalia in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark

Octavia Estelle Butler can be considered a visionary writer from many perspectives. The prominent science and speculative fiction writer is known for her afrofuturistic tropes. Her novels reflect relevance in today’s scenario in myriad ways. Clay’s Ark (1984) is a part of the Patternist Series. In this novel, Butler envisioned a humanity plagued by an alien microbe from another star named Proxima Centauri. The novel traces the spread of the pandemic caused by the Clay’s Ark microbe resulting in hybrid children who mix human and animal characteristics. Butler chose the trope of the alien microbe in a very different yet believable way. The hybrid children are the next stage of evolution in Butler’s Patternists world. The aim of this paper is to explore the hybrid identities caused by the pandemic in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark through the lens of biopolitics of difference and to reflect on the metaphorical significance of the same.

XIII—Dear Octavia Butler

Abstract One of Octavia Butler’s common sites of exploration concerns the impact of parenting on her main characters. She appeared to locate reproduction and child-rearing as parts of human life with great potentials for transformed futures. From a perspective of intergenerational survival, that hope appears perfectly reasonable. In this letter to Butler, I put the goal of intergenerational survival into question as an existential mandate by querying its relationship to gestative capture. Gestative capture here refers to the ready capacity to reduce an existent to immanence via their abilities to gestate ‘human’ or ‘human-like’ progeny. The conversation this letter stages with Butler and her work, which is only possible because of how clearly Butler understood gestative capture and how much she built it into her stories, asks the questions: What is ‘transcendence’ for Black women who can bear children? How ought we to imagine intergenerational survival? And when, if ever, should we put down ‘survival at all costs’ commitments?

A glimpse of Hope: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower as Critical Dystopias

A glimpse of Hope: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower as Critical Dystopias

Afrofütürizm’in Postkolonyal Çalışmalar ve Psikoanaliz Teori ile Bağlantısı

Although there have been a few scholars that have characterized Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston as writers who have contributed to the development of early forms of Afrofuturism, these studies do not approach such early Afrofuturistic works in the context of decolonization mainly due to the heavy interest given on technology and future. This article will focus on how Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Ellison’s Invisible Man can be categorized particularly as proto-Afrofuturist works because of the writers’ use of decolonized alternative spaces and technological discourse to generate alternative futures. In addition, Octavia Butler’s Kindred will be analyzed as an Afrofuturistic novel to enable readers to have a greater understanding of the context. The protagonists, their state of beings and transformations—both physical and mental—are analyzed accordingly to draw parallelism between the proto-Afrofuturistic and Afrofuturistic works. The analysis also helps to categorize the works of Hurston and Ellison as novels that have contributed to the development of Afrofuturism as a movement. More specifically, this article will focus on a discussion on the key aspects that constitute Afrofuturism including the use of settings in the novels as alternative spaces, as well as the depiction of the characters’ body and language in psychoanalytic theory in terms of alienation and decolonization of the characters within a reading of Afrofuturism.