Abstract
This essay draws on the author’s experiences teaching in the fall of 2020 and serving as associate director of the City University of New York’s Transformative Learning in the Humanities ...initiative to propose and describe an “environmental” or “habitable pedagogy” for the twenty-first century.
This article examines Gisèle Pineau's Fleur de Barbarie (
2007
), Fabienne Kanor's Je ne suis pas un homme qui pleure (
2016
) and Gaël Octavia's La Bonne Histoire de Madeleine Démétrius (
2020
). ...Striking similarities between the texts produce a coherent vision of the contemporary Antillean woman writer as a rounded, independent figure who balances individual, collective, personal and literary elements of her life and adopts a singular approach to the intergenerational dynamics that are so important in Antillean culture. As a woman, she seeks to end painful intergenerational family legacies; as a writer, she detaches herself from the overdetermining, backward-looking and vertical metaphor of the literary family tree (whether patri- or matrilinear), in favor of a more horizontal fellowship of black women writers that creates space both for her and for other writers who might join her.
I began writing about power because I had so little, Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman--an alien in American society and among science fiction writers--informed ...the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction. Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.
XIII—Dear Octavia Butler Dotson, Kristie
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
10/2023, Letnik:
123, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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?
This paper employs theories of childhood sexuality to frame an analysis of the posthuman politics in Octavia E. Butler's vampire novel Fledgling (2005). Throughout the novel, Shori, the child ...protagonist, discovers her posthuman identity through political and social discourses of her juvenile sexuality. Designed as a genetic experiment to breed sun-resistant melanin into the population of her vampire species, Shori's procreative potential forms one of the central conflicts of the novel. Childhood sexuality also serves a didactic role, helping both human and vampire characters create, accept, and learn about posthuman ways of being. I draw on Rosi Braidotti's conception of an embodied critical posthumanism and bring it into conversations with scholars of childhood sexuality-including Katheryn Bond Stockton, James Kincaid, Steven Bruhm, and Natasha Hurley-to interrogate the posthuman potential of the sexual child. It follows that I examine how Shori's juvenile sexuality marks a continuation of Butler's longstanding interests in discourses of race, agency, and symbiosis. The complexity of childhood sexuality in the novel challenges popular narratives of childhood innocence and establishes the child as a productive site of posthuman possibility.
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.
This essay argues for the critical importance of archives and archive-building in the life and work of Octavia E. Butler in the face of both real-world and imaginative narratives of apocalypse and ...species suicide. I read Butler's Parable series and selected archival texts combining a Derridean understanding of the archive as both a "shelter" and an "authority"-an ongoing and unruly process as much as an object of study-and black feminist theory that imagines a "home place" for preserving authorial voice and agency. I read archival practice as central to the new generic term "visionary fiction" since it provides black women writers in particular a space to record their lives and voices in deliberate ways that allow different political and ontological possibilities for the future. Butler's archive is vital to understanding her work.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed individual and institutional anxieties about the apocalypse. Pastors and activists alike turned to the depiction of the apocalypse in popular media to describe the ...urgency of decisive action. Implicitly, these depictions offer a curious method for engaging and imagining children. Assata Shakur writes compelling poetry in her autobiography about her hopes for the world. In one poem, entitled For My Daughter Kakuya, I argue that Shakur engages in Afrofuturist speculative fiction as she envisions a future world for her daughter. This paper explores how writers living through these times themselves imagine Black children at the end of the world. What would happen if we took seriously the notion that the “end of the world” is always at hand for Black people? This article explores the stomach-turning warning that Jesus offers in Mark 13:14–19 regarding those who are “pregnant and nursing in those days”. Using a reproductive justice lens, this paper explores the eternal challenge of imagining and stewarding a future in which Black children are safe and thriving. It also explores the limits and possibilities of partnering with radical Black faith traditions to this end.
