Octavia Butler Research Articles

The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought by Roger A. Sneed

Reviewed by: The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thoughtby Roger A. Sneed Ruth Myers Shaping God and Shaping Change. Roger A. Sneed. The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought. Ohio State UP, 2021. xiv+ 181 pp. $99.95 hc, $29.95 pbk & ebk. Roger A. Sneed's The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thoughtis an important contribution to the critical scholarship that addresses Black science fiction and spirituality. Given his academic background, Sneed offers a corrective to traditional forms of Black spirituality found in Black liberation theology. For scholars such as bell hooks, James Cone, and Cornell West, Black spirituality remains tied to Christian ideology, [End Page 401]limiting the possibilities for Black queer identities and thought. Sneed's perspective, however, is unbounded by previous ideas regarding Black religious thought. Necessarily, then, he begins his book by making a distinction between Black religion and Black church in order to clarify his terminology. Distinguishing himself from traditional schools of Black spirituality, Sneed likewise encourages readers to broaden their views of Black spirituality to encompass the imaginative properties essential to Afrofuturism. Free from the limitations of rigid theological confines, the Afrofuturist can engage in all modes of spirituality, which is inextricable from both "nam[ing] (and shap[ing]) God" (3). Mirroring the spiritual endeavors of Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower(1993), Sneed likewise contends that "God is change. Change is God. We shape that change, and that change shapes us" (2). For Olamina and Sneed alike, institutionalized forms of spirituality often "rob us of the creative possibilities inherent in the encounters with God-as-world" (2). According to Sneed, regardless of their spiritual backgrounds, human beings are critically involved in shaping God and shaping future possibilities for Black people. Afrofuturism is an eschatological endeavor in which humans create a future that, if we are to have any hope, does not mirror the horrors of a collective racist history. Despite the fact that theological training comprises much of his educational background, Sneed asserts that he is "not writing theology" (xii). Yet his writings are not entirely agnostic either. In opposition to spiritual binaries, Sneed offers an alternative space by bringing Black spirituality together with Afrofuturism, a combination he sees as productive and helpful for imagining future possibilities freed from oppressive bounds of racist thinking. For Sneed, engaging in Afrofuturism is inherently both prophetic and imaginative (3). Afrofuturism resists not only the religious circumscription of former modes of Black spirituality, but is also an important tool of resistance against white supremacy that delimits the potential possibilities for Black life. Although Afrofuturism counters the racist ideology of white supremacy, "racism is not necessarily Afrofuturism's central concern" (151). Likewise, as a formidable counter to narratives that center white characters and marginalize Black ones, Afrofuturism is unabashed in its assertions of Black centrality: "Afrofuturistic consciousness yields a vision of Blackness that … is not bound by whiteness" (2). Afrofuturism not only represents Black concerns but also centers on the power and triumph of Black hope. In this way, Afrofuturism maintains a focus both on Black characters and Black audiences. Sneed defines Afrofuturism as "Black people throughout the African diaspora taking science fiction, horror, fantasy, and other forms of speculative fiction and repurposing them into the service of more fully describing Black lives, experiences and concerns" (20). As such, Afrofuturism can be seen as a mechanism to expose the systems of oppression that have historically (and presently) function to threaten and exploit Black lives. According to Sneed, Afrofuturism at its best is intersectional, providing space for a multitude of [End Page 402]Black identities. In contrast to both the white straight males pictured in much of traditional sf and the heteronormative Blackness inherent in Black liberation theology, Sneed argues that Afrofuturist writers often write, sing, and envision characters with expansive, intersectional identities. For example, as Sneed suggests, all of Octavia Butler's protagonists are Black women who often hold non-traditional beliefs and/or orientations. Following this model, Afrofuturism is concerned not just with representing peoples of various races and genders, but also those who maintain different modes of being in the...

Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin (review).

Reviewed by: Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin David Theodore (bio) Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life Edited by Ruha Benjamin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 416. The scholars in this edited collection merge American race and ethnicity studies with science and technology studies. The book's title plays on the word capture: technology is captivating, editor Ruha Benjamin suggests, in that it takes hold of both bodies and imaginations, imprisoning us in deleterious mental, physical, and social structures. In his foreword, sociologist Troy Duster evokes social construction, writing that algorithms and robots can be racist because racist societies constructed them. Benjamin's premise is more pointed: the technology that enthralls us in our daily lives is precisely the technology that enables social control of racialized people. Technoscience embeds and extends carceral states. Sometimes multiauthor collections don't hang together well. This one does. The project began with a symposium Benjamin organized at Princeton University in 2015, entitled "Ferguson Is the Future." Four presenters from that symposium are in this book; three of them, Benjamin and sociologists Alondra Nelson and Dorothy Roberts, contribute interviews rather than studies. Sprightly curated into three sections, the twelve chapters move from physical imprisonment to digital surveillance to speculation about a postcarceral future. One binding theme is the practice of including the author in both the scholarly framework and the narrative arc. The leitmotif here is Duster's aphorism, "Scratch a theory, you find a biography," laid out in his interview with Benjamin in the book's fourth section. Andrea Miller, for instance, begins a chapter on drones and policing by recounting a 2016 visit to a lasershow at Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta. Mitali Thakor's analysis of how police use digital tools to track child pornography began with three years of ethnographic fieldwork. Madison Van Oort probed the fastfashion retail industry by working in it. Another theme is that activist scholarship should take inspiration from art. Benjamin cites novelist Octavia Butler in the introduction, bluntly assessing fiction writers as kin to STS scholars. Thus liberated, the writers range wide in their sources. R. Joshua Scannell looks at Stephen Spielberg's film Minority Report to address the sociological harms of anticipating crimes before they happen. Anthony Ryan Hatch cites the television show Chopped in his plea to cut the link between corporate food production and prison life. And Christopher Perreira uses a 2008 Chicano novel by Alejandro Morales to understand racialized medical care in a Southern California tuberculosis sanatorium. [End Page 867] As a result, the authors invoke history often but rarely have historical questions or arguments. Neither race nor science nor technology develops or changes over time in any meaningful way; digital surveillance through data tracking is no different, conceptually, than physical imprisonment. Britt Rusert for instance, takes the concept of "laboratory life," applies it to the colonial plantation, and then uses that rubric to analyze black biopower in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. To get a view of the questions about race and technology posed to historians, scholars might read this collection alongside archive-based studies such as Benjamin Wiggins's Calculating Race (Oxford UP, 2020), which traces the twinned histories of race and actuarial risk, and Charlton McIlwain's Black Software (Oxford UP, 2020), which covers racial justice and the development of computing technology (both books were reviewed in the July 2021 issue of this journal). Still, the optimistic commitment to creative activist scholarship makes any concerns about historiography pedantic. The word "liberatory" in the subtitle is a vector. The authors suggest that existing states of affairs can serve as foils for imagining the future. Lorna Roth discusses the liberatory potential of Shirley Cards, the reference photographs created by Kodak for verifying skin color balance. Tamara K. Nopper's chapter on credit scores and the harms of digital profiles urges action. Ron Eglash theorizes a generative form of technological antiracism. And Nettrice R. Gaskins coins the term "techno-vernacular creativity" to explain how underrepresented ethnic groups use technology for cultural production through adaption and remixing—making new by making do with what's available here and now...

Toward an Ethics of Affinity: Posthumanism and the Question of the Animal in Two SF Narratives of Catastrophe

ABSTRACT This article reads two narratives of catastrophe, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” (1983) and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” (2015), in an attempt to explore how their concern with disaster destabilizes the binary human/nonhuman. Conjuring up visions of transformation and extinction before and after catastrophe, the stories interrogate humanist accounts of subjectivity through their focus on language and consciousness, prompting us to rethink the ontological divide between the human and the animal. This interrogation is carried out not only at the level of thematics, but also at a formal level, through the techniques of defamiliarization and extrapolation as well as through the choice of narrative voice and focalization. Thus, the two stories engage with some of the key issues addressed by the discourses originating from the fields of animal studies and critical posthumanism, which are currently gaining momentum in philosophy and literary criticism in the context of the Posthuman turn. As will be contended, the stories send a powerful message about the boundary between self and other, highlighting the necessity of a shift toward a posthumanist ethics of affinity.

Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel

AbstractMary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.

Erotic Surgery: J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” and the Visual Legacy of the Medical Museum

This essay delves into medicine’s historically strange relation to erotic intimacy by juxtaposing an analysis of the exhibitionary objects of medical museums, with particular attention to the eighteenth-century Anatomical Venus wax models, against speculative fictions by Octavia Butler (“Bloodchild,” 1995) and J. G. Ballard (Crash, 1973). The historically legitimizing structure of dissection and the edutainment of the public medical museum have the potential to catalyze aesthetic fantasies of nude, splayed, vulnerable bodies to those outside the immediate realm of the medical field. Although we might imagine the concept of “erotic surgery” to be one that is relegated to the nightmarish fantasies of dystopic futures, it is an aesthetic phenomenon that looks back into surgical history as much as it looks forward.

Afrofuturism and the Law

Long before the film Black Panther captured the public’s imagination, the cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” to describe “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture.” Since then, the term has been applied to speculative creatives as diverse as the pop artist Janelle Monae, the science fiction writer Octavia Butler, and the visual artist Nick Cave. But only recently have thinkers turned to how Afrofuturism might guide, and shape, law. This special issue, “Afrofuturism and the Law,” features articles that explore the many ways Afrofuturism can inform a range of legal issues, and even chart the way to a better future for us all.

The Oankali Approach to Remembering in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood

The Oankali Approach to Remembering in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood R. Nicole Smith (bio) In the tradition of speculative fiction, this essay asks, “what if?”: What if we reconstructed the path to Black liberation using a new framework for remembering? Instead of navigating rememory of the cultural and historical traumas of chattel slavery and colonization, we would prioritize remembering these important histories as collections of cautionary tales to be honored, retold, and reinformed. In this model, historical narratives about genocidal pasts would not transmit the emotional trauma of these stories to future generations. Instead, these past accounts would persist as contributions to a data stream that honors the holistic, traumatic experiences of ancestors’ experiences and retain these historical narratives as fluid and intentionally instructional information. Evoking the characteristics of Sankofa, members of the African diaspora would engage this information as protected data that shapes liberated, contented Black futures. There is precedent for employing an ethos of contentment as a framework for liberation. One example lies in activist adrienne maree brown’s concept of pleasure activism. The author describes her concept as, “. . . the work we do to reclaim ourselves as whole happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (9). Another model exists in cultural strategist Anasa Troutman’s use of love as a philosophical framework for her social justice activism (Troutman, From Justice to Joy). The Oankali aliens in Octavia Butler’s first-contact trilogy Lilith’s Brood (2000), originally published as Xenogenesis (1987–1989), offer a similarly unique, albeit figurative model for Black liberation through the aliens’ approach to memory. For the Oankali, memories are material to be “examined, memorized, and either preserved alive or allowed to live their natural span and die” (693). Their primary view of memories as data does not invite an emphasis on the emotional pain associated with cultural, historical, and related, individual traumas. Instead, the outcome of the Oankali approach to memory engages remembrance as a Sankofa-inspired data stream, a resource that shapes the future. This extraterrestrial model for engaging memory offers a more expedient and sustainable path to healing than rememory. Toni Morrison introduces readers to the term rememory in her novel Beloved. Morrison describes this term as “recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past” (Source, 323). Morrison continues, “Therefore not only is the major preoccupation of the central [End Page 163] characters that of reconstituting and recollecting a usable past . . . but also the narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process” (323, my emphasis). Sethe, the protagonist in Beloved illustrates this tension in her conversation with her daughter Denver and describes rememory as a remembrance that exists as a tangible image, almost like a photograph. You can even, she tells her daughter Denver, bump up against someone else’s rememory - especially if you stand in the place where the memory originated. She calls a person’s initial experience with this, a “thought picture” (Beloved, 35–36). For Sethe, rememory lives and breathes and endangers. As such, it can linger in a place, almost like a ghost, and cause psychic and emotional damage (McDonald 36). She warns her daughter Denver to never return to the Sweet Home plantation Sethe escaped from because, “if you go there (you who’ve never been there) and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again . . . it is waiting for you” (Beloved, 36). Here Sethe, like the Oankali, presents to her daughter an approach to memories that she thinks will enable Denver to survive. However, unlike the Oankali, Sethe’s approach prioritizes the persistence of the past in the present. In doing so, she paints trauma and its companion, rememory, as temporal fixatives that do not offer psychological or emotional room for sustained healing and future building. Sethe’s narrative becomes unstuck when she gains the ability to instead place emphasis on present experiences. Sethe processes her pain and engages her memories as information that constantly informs her present moments. Following the Oankali model, Sethe examines her memories and...

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement Reynaldo Anderson (bio) There is an energy abroad in the world today that is influenced by financialization, digitalization, commodification and globalization that seeks to marginalize presence, erase our memories, and quiet our voices. Yet we persist, we refuse to die, and our persistence has yielded fruit. The Black Speculative Arts Movement is a product of memories that survive in our cultural DNA that remind us of the need for safe harbors to imagine Black utopias for the beautiful unborn and honor the best of our past. More specifically, the Black Speculative tradition gave birth to what we now refer to as Afrofuturism with its roots in 19th century discourses around anti-slavery revolutionary practices, science, and early pan-Africanist sentiment. The cultural critic Greg Tate asserted that a people without visionaries is a people without an inspirational path to the future. Black speculative literatures genesis lies in the 19th century with the work of men and women like Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs and Pauline Hopkins. Their work grappled with the intersection of the oppression of African people, scientific racism, esotericism, and politics. Their work and other Black writers paralleled the emergence of the European science fiction tradition. The origins of the Black Speculative Arts Movement lie in the planning and execution of the Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination cocurated by John Jennings and I in a 2015 exhibition at the Schomburg library in Harlem, New York. The conceptual and speculative design for the exhibition were heavily influenced by the vision and scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and the ideas and material culture produced by artists and intellectuals that contribute to Black speculative culture. However, the social movement dynamism of the Black Speculative Arts Movement reflects historical processes, global in scope, that have historical currents in societal changes that have emerged the last 50 years. Although the movement is indebted to earlier Black diasporic art formations that date back to the early 20th century, it has been heavily influenced by the social changes described as Future Shock, Megatrends, and Acceleration. For example, what can be described as the Future Shock era of social change of the 60s and 70s aptly described by writer Alvin Toffler and singer Curtis Mayfield. Future Shock, or the social disorientation that accompanied rapid social change in technology and social values shaped the artistic work and production of creatives like Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and other artists and [End Page 5] thinkers of the period producing work that was in conversation with the global Black liberation struggle and Black Arts movement of the period in question. Moreover, the work of these artists would sow the seeds of creative thought and praxis later generations of creatives would refer to as Afrofuturism. However, the work of these creatives was only the beginning of forecasting the currents of social change that would be referred to by some as the era of megatrends of the late 20th century. The megatrends of the late 20th century reflected changes in capitalism that were tied to the end of the Cold War and an intensification of the spread of neoliberalism and globalization whose ideas and conceptual origins were reflected in the policies and ideas of Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, and Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, during this period of the late 80s and early 90s scholars like Cornel West, Molefi Asante, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks and others would produce intellectual works that would increasingly reflect a post-civil rights era sentiment among Black scholars. Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian characterized the environment best when she wrote an essay “The Race for Theory” in 1987 that described the environment surrounding the attempt to frame the new environment. During the period in question, Black Studies scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and C.T. Keto at Temple University, wrote about the destiny of African people in relation to time and space, and the need to be futurologists, and comic creators like Dwane McDuffie illustrated futuristic Black sensibilities. During this social milieu cultural critic Mark Dery wrote an article “Black to the Future” that observed the nexus between black speculative...

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement Shelby Crosby (bio) and Terrence Tucker (bio) In the essay, “Positive Obsession,1” Octavia Butler explores how she became a writer and, more importantly, why she chose to write science fiction (or what we now call Afrofuturism). Terribly shy, Butler’s love of science fiction and fantasy began as a way to escape and build worlds where she could be “a magical horse, a Martian, a telepath…. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these” (128). To be anywhere but here is part of Afrofuturism’s appeal. While these worlds can explore the realities of being Black in our current world, it also creates new images and feelings about said world. And that’s what we hope this issue will do for y’all—we want these essays to expand your minds and maybe even change how you see the world as the 80th CLA Convention we organized in Memphis in 2021 did for us. That conference inspired us to develop this issue. We want to keep the conversations started there going. The convention’s theme, Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions, carved out space to discuss explicitly the extensive presence of Black futurity, of race and technology, and of fantasy and science fiction as key parts of African American literary tradition. Black writers have always infused their work with speculative elements even as they chronicle Black life with unmatched forms of realism. And while we see Afrofuturism present in art, music, and fashion, as Isiah Warner III and Lisa Yasezk claim in their introduction to Literary Afrofuturism, “such powerful artistic statements derive from a much older entertainment medium: the printed word” which can “extend back to the writing of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley and nineteenth century abolitionist, solider, and journalist Martin Delany and continue today with the award-winning SF of Delany, Jemisin, and a host of other authors” (3). Our ideas for the convention and this issue stand on the shoulders of the Memphis native Sheree Renee Thomas, whose 2000 edited collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora served as a launch point to study Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism as traditions that reach as far back as the production of African American literature itself, as well as the history of CLA, itself founded in Memphis and still committed to the study and teaching of Black literature and language. We felt it critical to explore the history this tradition [End Page 1] while simultaneously celebrating the contemporary explosion of Afrofuturism in the mainstream, embodied by 2018’s Black Panther, and the well-known, overdue credit that Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler have begun to garner. These mainstream, public discussions of what Reynaldo Anderson has termed “Afrofuturism 2.0” appear at a crucial time in the history of Black folks because even as the technological advances and social media platforms that fuel this moment have brought Black people around the world more access, opportunities, and autonomy to be seen and heard, the external forces of white supremacy, colonialism, and market fundamentalism continue to oppress and dehumanize communities. Some of those forces have been emboldened over the last fifteen years as the post-Civil Rights, post-Obama period has failed to reverse the institutional impact of white supremacist hegemony. The persistence of police brutality and the explosion of mass incarceration, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the upsurge of white nationalism into mainstream rhetoric and policy have led many to abandon hope of ever achieving the equity that many have sought for generations. For some, the result has been the descent into the violence and apathy that engulfed the Black community in the 1980s and 1990s. The second, perhaps more insidious has been the abandonment of collective action in favor of an individualism that prioritizes the self-consciousness or assimilation of the one but rejects the philosophies of collective uplift over which activists, intellectuals, and artists battled deep into the 20th century. Historically African Americans relied on faith traditions, specifically through Black liberation theology and the black prophetic tradition...

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man by Michael Pitts

Reviewed by: Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Manby Michael Pitts Ezekiel Crago Manhood Revised. Michael Pitts. Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man. Lexington, 2021. 174 pp. $95 hc, $45 ebk. Michael Pitts's Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fictionis a book that needed to be written. It sheds light on a body of work underappreciated for its critique of hegemonic masculinity and its effects on society. Pitts traces the development of this critique over several decades as it evolves along with feminist discourse, becoming more intersectional and historically situated. He argues that "gender and national identity are mutually constitutive concepts" (1), using Todd Reeser's theory of a "gendered nation" (7). The novels analyzed in the book help to question how these concepts and identities are produced using a feminist utopia as a lens. This is a "critical utopia, for feminist writers seeking to critique masculinities in ways not available to them by realist fiction" that limits utopian imagining, instead "imbuing it with revolutionary feminist reframings of the good society" in which these writers imagine "the transformation of masculinities" (4). Pitts begins his exploration with novels published in the early 1970s that were "utopias directly opposing normative masculinities, [and] they outline the changes masculinities must undergo for the better, feminist society to be realized and, while challenging essentialism and the overlooking of race and sexuality within feminist circles, generally reflect second-wave feminism" (8). The first chapter discusses Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You(1971), a novel that offers the presumed sf audience of young men a cautionary tale about toxic manhood. It traces the transformation of a man who ascribes to hegemonic patriarchy, telling how he learned to perform and identify with a healthier, feminized masculinity that cares for others rather than only himself. He begins as an exploitative, rapacious bully who, through his encounter with a feminist utopia, develops empathy and compassion along with an ethics of care. Pitts argues that this novel represents the possibility of men learning alternative masculinities. The second chapter moves on in the decade with an analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed(1974). This novel poses the ever-present danger of hegemonic manhood by showing how enticing capitalist patriarchy is for [End Page 190]men, offering privilege and power to the violent, dominating manhood it validates. This book, according to Pitts, usefully shows how vigilant men must be to avoid performing this version of manhood through the novel's depiction of a man raised in a feminist utopia with no division of genders who is seduced by a society similar to the contemporary US, which offers power over others. The third chapter examines Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time(1976). Pitts notes that this novel crucially pivots from a focus on men to a story about a Latina woman, depicting how she must navigate systemic racism and patriarchal authority in both domestic and institutional medical settings, contrasting this with a feminist utopia in a possible future. This future is threatened by another possibility presented as a hypermasculine future that further subjugates women, rendering them into commodities to be rented by wealthy men. The novel is intersectional in its exploration of subjugation and offers a choice of futures between feminist and hypermasculinist. The fourth chapter discusses Octavia Butler's X enogenesistrilogy (1987-89), expanding on the discourse of intersectional feminism with a post-apocalypse protagonist, Lilith, a Black woman rescued by an invasive extraterrestrial colonizing species to enable them to breed a new hybrid species of humans and Oankali, as they call themselves. These novels, as Pitts explains, radically reimagine gendered and racialized social positions after our contemporary society has been eradicated by nuclear war. Ultimately, they posit a possible feminist utopia founded by Lilith's hybrid child, a non-binary human/Oankali/Ooloi who plays the role of a third crucial sex for reproduction of the species and mediates sexual contact between male and female. Throughout the series, Lilith and her brood must struggle against holdout groups of patriarchal authority, often by defending against violence while at the same time navigating their subjugation...

Introduction

Introduction

Prosthetic Symbiosis

Prosthetic Symbiosis

Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice

Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice

Review: Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, by Jayna Brown

Review: <i>Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds</i>, by Jayna Brown

The Immanent Infinite

The Immanent Infinite

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Freedom, Choice and Achieving Self-Realisation in the Dystopian World of Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

This study examines how the American science fiction author Octavia Butler (1947-2006) reflects the issue of how Olamina, the protagonist of Parable of the Talents (1998), attempts to establish a new religion, Earthseed, while changing her dystopian world. Butler is a distinguished novelist who brings to light the narrative on human life and challenges in a society where individuals are treated with discrimination and deprived of their rights, freedom, and independence, and takes a serious note of these topics by offering a representative portrait of the American society through her fiction. Here, we explore issues of human freedom, choice and self-realisation in a civil society by utilising a novel combination of the concepts of freedom and choice by John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin as well as self-realisation by Karl Marx as the fundamental elements to examine Olamina’s belief, attitude and the act of making choices. Our findings reveal that Olamina becomes an assertive and independent woman through two stages of self-realisation, namely self-actualisation and self-externalisation: she finds her voice, succeeds in challenging her ideological social system and, at last, successfully spreads her new philosophical ideas to another part of the world. Through our original methodology of combining the concepts of freedom, choice and self-realisation, we found that Butler has skillfully depicted the social and technological evolutions which have caused the futuristic dystopias in 2030s California, and further illustrates the ways that characters can confront these changes if given the freedom and the autonomy to act and change their oppressive existence.

From the Present to the Past: Redemptive Authority of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

The present paper aims to validate the idea that history is a foundational site of redemption. Through anachronistic traumatic journeys that take place in the present, Octavia Butler’s Kindred establishes symbolic and critical connections between past and present. Using magical realism, a counter hegemonic style, the novel blurs binary oppositions, such as past and present, dominant and dominated, questioning notions of hierarchy and dominance, and above all subverting the official reality of slavery. In re-enacting slavery, this historical narrative constructs a linkage across time and race, and conceives the relevance of the racial past. Drawing on the postmodern slave narrative framework, we trace the process whereby the main character submits to the position of slave and at the same time incorporates in the historical narrative representation her sense of self – her subjectification. This experiential position facilitates the construction of a counter hegemonic knowledge that undermines the master narrative of slavery.