This article reads the two standalone novels by Octavia Butler, Kindred and Fledgling, through the theoretical lens of shame. Through my close readings of the texts, I argue that the affect of shame, ...as it brings emotional and physical pain to the victims, is also indispensable to the survival of human community. Specifically, I propose three main claims about the representations of shame in Butler: that shame is largely a learned response closely associated with substances such as human blood, that to be shamed is to have always already been shamed, and that a permanent separation from shame poses life-threatening consequences. Of particular importance to my readings are earlier discussions about shame's productive roles, including those formulated in Silvan Tomkins's Affect Imagery Consciousness. Rather than recast shame in a completely positive light, I point to a capaciousness in Butler's understanding of shame.
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”.
In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two ...eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery-known in the press as the "Wild Man" and the "Goat Woman"-enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed. The crime drew national coverage when it came to light that Dana and Dockery, the alleged murderers, shared their huge, decaying antebellum mansion with their goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to call the estate "Goat Castle." Pearls was killed by an Arkansas policeman in an unrelated incident before he could face trial. However, as was all too typical in the Jim Crow South, the white community demanded "justice," and an innocent black woman named Emily Burns was ultimately sent to prison for the murder of Merrill. Dana and Dockery not only avoided punishment but also lived to profit from the notoriety of the murder by opening their derelict home to tourists.Strange, fascinating, and sobering, Goat Castle tells the story of this local feud, killing, investigation, and trial, showing how a true crime tale of fallen southern grandeur and murder obscured an all too familiar story of racial injustice.
The article investigates works by Octavia E. Butler (1947 –2006), an African-American writer who had a significant impact on the development of science fiction in the USA and the world. The paper ...provides an overview of Butler’s works and reveals the relationship between the problems and language / style of her prose, the latter being determined by the former. The first part of the paper examines the main topics of Butler’s works and focuses on the problem of survival. Being a disappearing minority, Butler’s heroines are usually isolated from others and, consequently, in order to survive they have to adapt to the circumstances, since resistance is impossible. However, for Butler the survival of an individual is less important than the preservation of the humankind. For Butler’s heroines it is the reproduction of the genetic and/or cultural memory of mankind that make the future possible and guarantee the survival. In the second part of the paper Butler’s works are analyzed in the context of Afrofuturism and it is pointed out that although Butler has much in common with other representatives of this movement, she deals with the projects for building an ideal society in a different way: Butler is skeptical about utopia as a project of a conflict-free society. The final part of the paper examines Butler’s language and style, noting that for her language serves as an impersonal, objective tool of analysis of human behavior. A special attention is paid to Butler’s latest novel Fledgling (2005), in which language serves both as a tool for expression and a topical issue.
This article by applying diaspora theories to Octavia Butler’s vampire novel Fledgling (2005), will engender a critical engagement with the issues of difference and hybridity. By examining the ...oscillating relations between the hybrid vampire protagonist Shori, her human symbionts, and the vampire diasporic community, this study reflects on the complexity of the diasporic condition; especially, the conflicting claims of belonging where the celebration of hybridity can easily go hand in hand with ethnocentric articulations of nationhood. The focus of this paper will be threefold. The first part will unpack the historical scope of the vampire Ina diaspora, highlighting the three constitutive elements of diasporic experience which are dispersion, homeland orientation, and boundary maintenance. The second part sheds light on the problematic nature of Ina/human relationship termed as ‘mutualistic symbiosis.’ And the last part will interrogate the hybrid identity of Shori Matthews, questioning whether this cross-breed vampire with Afro-American human genes can really hold the potential for boundary-crossing and write her scripts of survival on the necessity of embracing diversity and change without being dichotomized by issues of national belonging and identity politics.
African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much ...scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns.
Lacking property and stocks passed down through generations and burdened by greater reliance on consumer credit, Black and Latino/a borrowers were less able to weather the sudden decline in home ...values.2 Foregrounding their predicament, the incomprehensible task of affording the consequences of not-paying what the lenders knew were unpayable debts allows questions that challenge the assumption that the failure to meet an obligation should necessarily lead to punishment when the lender's profits are secured by betting and spreading the risk globally, against the "high-risk" borrower.3 In considering the unpayable debts as a trigger for the current financial crisis, this special issue highlights the racial and colonial logic of global capitalism. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Roland Robertson, and other early theorists of globalization have called attention to the significance of risk.4 Few of these scholars, however, anticipated that racial/ cultural difference, as an element of representation, would enter into risk calculations in the ways it did during the boom phase of the housing market. ...subsequent research on the "circulation of risk," shifting the analytic focus away from the postindustrial North, revealed that "unregulated flows of capital are engendering a turbulence that is undermining the lives of even peoples who inhabit territories incomparably distant and different from the landscapes of metropolitan capital.
Yet scholars who are less familiar with DH or race and ethnicity theory should approach the book cautiously. Given the importance of the subject matter, and the high probability that this book will ...be used in classrooms and by nonspecialists, it is worth expanding on two cases in which technical issues have important implications for the volume’s analysis of race. ...a crucial part of the operation of whiteness for most of US history has been its capacity to go without mention. ...is obviously a committed antiracist, so he cannot really believe that textual features characteristic of successful books by white people made those books bestsellers, rather than that they arose as side effects of structural racism, or that the solution is for Black authors to write more like authors who have succeeded within that racist framework.
SUMMARY
In this article, I begin with a broad question for anthropological philosophy—what is the human?—to turn toward a related question for social analysis: How did the concept of gender become a ...constitutive part of being human? Octavia Butler's speculative historical novel, Wild Seed (1980), troubles gender's conceptual metaphysics, serving as a precursor for the exploration of an alternative humanism found in Sylvia Wynter's “Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground' of Caliban's ‘Woman’” (1990). By anticipating Wynter's reading of Caliban and his missing, desired “woman,” Butler inverts the demonic grounds of negated progeny, reproduction, and patriarchal authority. In addition to speculating about the ontology of racialized femaleness, Wild Seed situates embodied maleness as an equal ontological problem. While Caliban is overly embodied, lacking patriarchal masculinity and its reproductive trappings, Wild Seed reintroduces the ontological problem of genderless embodiment through the native's/African's masculinity. Butler explores unthinkable human existence through the question of how gender pairs became a constitutive aspect of the human, rather than by focusing on one half of a gender binary over another. “(In)humanism” is conceptually provisional, intended to illustrate the transitional reason that underlies both formation and disappearance of what counts as humanness. human, gender, Sylvia Wynter, Octavia Butler, embodiment
This article explores her multivalent approach to questions of futurity and the bodily reproduction it is reliant upon in Wild Seed (1980) and “Bloodchild” (1984), works that look critically at the ...past while remaining grounded in the present. In these stories, reproduction is multi-sexed, gendered, and posthuman, vividly rendering the yet imagined possibility of male impregnation and more capacious relations between human and nonhuman animals. Here, the importance of the question about what good this is for Black people frames an exploration of Butler’s incisive speculation about the possibilities of Black reproductive power as a resistant mode of being that dares to exceed boundaries erected by narrowly defined structures of identity rooted in sexist and racist ideas. Butler presents a socially fraught representation of biological reproduction in all its bodily grotesqueness, marked by an insistence on attending to the lateral and hierarchical relations complicated by procreation. She reminds us that to reproduce is to bear a visceral burden, and that this burden holds immense implications for the ethical making and sustaining of lives, especially in oppressive conditions.
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