In this essay I argue that Octavia Butler's work provides fine examples of what Tom Moylan has called the "critical dystopia," a narrative which points to the socio-historic causes of the dystopian ...elements of our culture rather than one which merely reveals symptoms. Butler works through the dystopian elements of the culture and then seeks to create new myths for the postmodern age. She does not offer a full-blown utopian "blueprint" in her work, but rather a post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past. In both the Xenogenesis trilogy and Parable of the Sower, Butler stares into the abyss of the dystopian future and reinvents the desire for a better world. In doing so, she places herself firmly within a rich tradition of feminist utopian writing while also speaking to some of the same issues as Marxist critic Fredric Jameson and postmodern feminist thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Gloria Anzaldùa.
"Force. Spirit. Feeling": Rewriting the Slave Ship in Contemporary African American Literature examines the trope of the slave ship in late twentieth-century African American literature. I argue that ...while the slave ship is a site of historical trauma, the ship space has been repurposed to signify not just loss, but freedom in black American writing. Contemporary writers utilize figurative depictions of the slave ship to probe temporality and ongoing experiences of loss and displacement in twentieth-century America. Writers such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, August Wilson, Octavia Butler, and Saidiya Hartman turn to the ship space as a figurative vehicle in order to clarify questions of collective identity, cultural memory, and revolutionary consciousness. My project contributes to current conversations in the field of African American literary studies surrounding literary tradition, critical and conceptual genealogies, embodiment, and memory. Through close readings of figurative language I identify four metaphorical spheres associated with the slave ship: the hold as the foremost site of terror, the psychological effects of enclosure and captivity, the black woman as most vulnerable victim, and the bodily as well as psychic effects of possession. There exists a slave ship dialectic in contemporary black American fiction and drama between representations of the material conditions experienced by the enslaved during the Middle Passage and an abstraction of the slave ship that posits the ship as a frame through which to examine alienation and displacement in the context of U.S. nationality and citizenship. My scholarship is in conversation with historical studies of the slave ship and the Transatlantic Slave Trade such as those of Marcus Rediker, Stephanie Smallwood, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Ian Baucom that place the ship and the sailor at the center of modernity rather than its periphery. I claim that the slave ship is an artistic symbol that pushes against liberal humanism to theorize a form of collectivity based upon remembrance and counternarratives to U.S. imperialism.
Nonhuman intelligence is a topic of vigorous inquiry in the sciences, but how is it broached by the humanities -- especially in literary narrative -- and what does its method of presentation have to ...teach us about how the relationship between the sciences and the humanities is changing? To explore answers to these questions, I have established a new grouping of literary works, called "cybertech", and defined it as bounded within the system of fictional narratives which ask the following questions: 1) What can ken (be familiar with something or someone); 2) What is the range of what can be kenned?; and 3) How is what is kenned demarcated? By taking five contemporary novels as keystone examples of this grouping, I conclude that a thought experiment uniting the sciences and the humanities -- that which contemplates whether synthetic intelligences, and/or nonhuman biological organisms, might be able to develop "human-equivalent" consciousness -- is rich with possibilities for potential insights into human consciousness itself: what it is, how it works, and what the range is of what it can experience.
