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★ ★ OCTAVIA BUTLER NOW! READING RACE, GENDER, AND CRITICAL FUTURES FALL 2021 ENGL A490.001 | Great Figures TR 3:30-4:45 | Location TBA Loyola University New Orleans Prof. R. Scott Heath [email protected] ★ ★ OCTAVIA BUTLER NOW! READING RACE, GENDER, AND CRITICAL FUTURES Dr. R. S. Heath ENGL A490.001 (Great Figures: Octavia Butler) Office: 316 Bobet Hall Fall 2021 Hours: MW by appointment TR 3:30-4:45P Email: [email protected] Course Description Octavia E. Butler might be called the patron saint of black science fiction, a literary genre sometimes classified as Afrofuturism. Recently, her likeness and her ideas—especially those conveyed in her novels Kindred and Parable of the Sower—have been trending publicly, proving stunningly resonant and possibly prophetic in these uncertain times. For centuries, black writers and artists have theorized and continually revised aesthetic modes for the representation of American subjectivity, especially with regard to and in response to conventions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality in the United States. Presently, the country is being met with a set of intersecting, interconnected crises—a global health emergency, an economic collapse, a social upheaval, a climate firestorm, a political spiral—that have required our isolation while simultaneously inspiring monumental collective action. The disproportionately distributed impact of these overlapping catastrophes has driven ongoing conflicts emergent along reliable fault lines of blackness and Americanness, difference and belonging. Octavia Butler operates as a metacritic, writing herself into a framework not designed with her in mind, transforming the mechanism while intimately illustrating and explicating our own alienation. In this single-author, seminar-style course we will examine Butler’s long fiction in its entirety—along with a cache of screen media—tracing its continuity of themes and discerning its usefulness in our current cultural context. As a blatantly speculative project, we will read her near-future work with a hard parallel to the potential traumas and possible solutions of today. Required Texts Octavia E. Butler, Kindred Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago) Octavia Butler, Seed to Harvest (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster) Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents Octavia Butler, Fledgling Each assignment from these novels will be specifically coupled with at least one other work proposing social and historical context for our readings and critiques. These additional required texts include films, music, and literature made accessible online. This material has been selected to situate our discussions of black speculative culture. Recommended Texts Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories Octavia E. Butler, Survivor .

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Octavia E. Butler Telling My Stories
Octavia E. Butler Telling My Stories Library, West Hall April 8–August 7, 2017 1 Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was a pioneer, a trailblazing storyteller who brought her voice— the voice of a woman of color—to science fiction. Her fresh approach to what some might consider a nonliterary genre framed serious and often controversial topics through a literary lens. Tackling subjects such as power, race, gender, sexuality, religion, economic and social status, the environment, and humanity, Butler combined the tropes of science fiction and fantasy with a tightly rendered and entertaining prose style. These are her stories. Her deeply developed characters contend with extraordinary situations, revealing the best and worst of the human species. As the first African American woman writer in the field of science fiction, Butler faced pressures and challenges from inside and outside her community. Tired of science fiction stories featuring only white male heroes, Butler took action. “I can write my own stories and I can write myself in,” as she liked to say, and in the process she created a new identity as a black woman role model and an award-winning author. She published 12 novels and a volume of short stories and essays before her untimely passing in 2006. “Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories” draws on the author’s manuscripts, correspondence, papers, and photographs, bequeathed to The Huntington, to explore the life and works of this remarkable woman. Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, Calif., on June 22, 1947. Butler discovered writing at an early age, finding that this activity suited her shy nature, her strict Baptist upbringing, and her intellectual curiosity.
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Octavia E. Butler Papers
http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8fn17qs No online items Octavia E. Butler Papers Huntington Library. Manuscripts Department Huntington Library. Manuscripts Department 1151 Oxford Road San Marino, California 91108 (626) 405-2100 [email protected] http://www.huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary.aspx?id=554 2013 Octavia E. Butler Papers mssOEB 1-8000 1 Descriptive Summary Title: Octavia E. Butler Papers Dates: 1933-2006 Collection Number: mssOEB 1-8000 Creator/Collector: Butler, Octavia E. Extent: 8000 pieces in 354 boxes, 1 volume, 2 binders, and 18 broadsides. Repository: Huntington Library. Manuscripts Department San Marino, California 91108 Abstract: The personal and professional papers of American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Language of Material: English Access The collection is open for qualified researchers as of Nov. 1, 2013. Publication Rights The literary copyright of materials by Octavia E. Butler is held by the Estate of Octavia E. Butler. Anyone wishing to quote from or publish any manuscript material by Octavia E. Butler must contact the agent listed below. Questions should also be directed to the agent below. Agent contact info: Merrilee Heifetz Writers House 21 West 26th St New York City, NY 10010 [email protected] (212) 685-2605 The copyright for materials by others represented in the collection is held by other parties. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine the current copyright holder and obtain permission from the appropriate parties. The Huntington Library retains the physical rights to the material. In order to quote from, publish, or reproduce any of the manuscripts or visual materials, researchers must obtain formal permission from the office of the Library Director, in addition to permission obtained from any copyright holders.
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Octavia Butler Strategic Reader Collected from the Octavia Butler Symposium, Allied Media Conference 2010 and Edited by Adrienne Maree Brown & Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Octavia Butler Strategic Reader collected from the Octavia Butler Symposium, Allied Media Conference 2010 and edited by Adrienne Maree Brown & Alexis Pauline Gumbs Table of Contents: - Intro - What is Emergent Strategy - Octavia’s Work as a Whole Identity Transformation Apocalypse Impact - Specific Series/Stories Patternist (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, Patternmaster) Lilith’s Brood/Xenogenesis (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago) Parables (Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents) Other Stories - Other Relevant Work Mentioned (music, writers, etc) Intro This reader emerged out of the Octavia Butler Symposium at the Allied Media Conference in 2010. The symposium happened in 3 parts - a) an initial presentation by host/editor Adrienne Maree Brown, b) a fishbowl conversation where everyone in the group participated in addressing meta-questions about Octavia's work, and c) several small group conversations on particular series. Groups have since started reading circles, strategic circles and other gatherings around Octavia's work in their local cities/regions. This is by no means a comprehensive or complete reader - there are books (Kindred, Fledgling, Survivor) that are barely touched on. We hope that this can be a growing reader which both helps people see Octavia’s work in a new light and serves as a collecting point for thinking about her work. What follows are strategic questions to consider about Octavia's work as a whole, and then about specific series/stories. We invite feedback and additions. "We are all vibrations. The moment we share here is a preparation for the next moment. Octavia leaves her writing in order to prepare us for the next meeting." "Being able to create and imagine bigger is a process of decolonization of our dreams.
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Experience, Research, and Writing: Octavia E. Butler As an Author Of
Experience, Research, and Writing Octavia E. Butler as an Author of Disability Literature Sami Schalk In a journal entry on November 12, 1973, Octavia E. Butler writes: “I should stay healthy! The bother and worry of being sick and not being able to afford to do anything but complain about the pain and hope it goes away is Not conducive to good (or prolific) writing.”1 At this time, at the age of twenty-six, Butler had not yet sold her first novel. She was just on the cusp of what would be an incredible writing career, starting with her first novel, Patternmaster, published a mere three years later. But in 1973,Butler was an essentially unknown and struggling writer who regularly battled poverty, health, and her own harsh inner critic. From the outset of her career, Butler’s texts have been lauded, critiqued, and read again and again in relationship to race, gender, and sexuality. Only recently, however, has her work been taken up in respect to disability.2 Therí A. Pickens argues,“Situating disability at or near the center of Butler’s work (alongside race and gender) lays bare how attention to these categories of analysis shifts the conversation about the content of Butler’s work.”3 Building upon Pickens and other recent work on Butler and disability, I seek to change conversations about Butler’s work among feminist, race, and genre studies scholars while also encouraging more attention to Butler by disability studies scholars. In this article, I use evidence from Butler’s personal papers, public interviews, and publications to position Butler as an author of disability literature due to her lived experi- ences, her research, and her writing.
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Print Kindred
Kindred-no Times ten 11/5/04 11:47 am Page 265 Reader’s Guide Critical Essay ROBERT CROSSLEY University of Massachusetts at Boston “What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery!” Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl I First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died. But the literary form has persisted, just as the legacy of slavery has per- sisted, into the present. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of what has been christened the “neo-slave narrative,” a fictional mutation of the autobiographies of nineteenth-century Americans who lived as slaves. Among the many historical novels, often with first-person narrators, that have recreated the era of slavery, some of the best known are Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Mor- rison’s Beloved (1987), and Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990). Octavia Butler’s hybrid of memoir and fantasy is a distinctive contribu- tion to the genre of neo-slave narrative. Although Kindred is not itself a work of science fiction, Butler has brought to the creation of this narrative the sensibilities of an author who works largely outside the tradition of realism. When Kindred first appeared twenty-five years ago, no one had thought of using the fictional conventions of time travel to transport a modern African American to an antebellum plantation. Time-traveling Kindred-no Times ten 11/5/04 11:47 am Page 266 266 READER’S GUIDE narratives are always replete with paradoxical questions: If you travel back a century and a half and kill your own great-great-grandfather, can you yourself ever be born? Is it as possible for the future to influence the past as it is for the past to shape the future? But then every good work of fiction is paradoxical: It lies like the truth.
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The Ethics of Alienation in Octavia E. Butler and Gilles Deleuze
MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN: THE ETHICS OF ALIENATION IN OCTAVIA E. BUTLER AND GILLES DELEUZE TIM LAURIE University of Sydney Since Octavia E. Butler published her first novel Patternmaster, in 1976,1 her science fiction and fantasy novels have attracted interest from a range of perspectives, including feminist literary studies, postcolonial theory and posthumanism. Across the Patternmaster and Xenogenesis series, Butler‘s engagement with the gendered dimensions of ethical and social obligation has intersected in striking ways with ongoing discussions in feminist and postcolonial critical theory, while being criticized for its recuperation of normative family values and its naturalization of gendered social behaviours.2 In this paper, I will explore her complex ethical responses to developments in genetics and sociobiology in the 1970s, with a focus on the ethics of filiation and altruism in Butler‘s works, and drawing upon celebratory and critical readings of Butler from the feminist perspectives of Donna Haraway, Nancy Jesser and Michelle Osherow. Butler‘s speculations about the possibilities of futures based on very different ―humans‖ will then be compared with those of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophies of biology and human agency, especially those developed with Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, reflect similar anxieties around the normative definitions of human behavior implicit in both sociobiology and psychoanalysis. While it is difficult to place philosophical texts in conversation with literary works, especially when both authors and their imagined audiences are separated by linguistic, cultural and geographical divides, this analysis teases out some of the overlapping challenges faced in mapping out utopian (or revolutionary) thought beyond the limits of the human.
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T H E H U Ntin Gton L Ibrary, a Rt C Ollection S, an D B Otan Ical G Arden S
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens CALENDARCALENDAR March/April 2017 March/April General Information Telephone: 626-405-2100 Website: huntington.org Admission: Members: Free. Non-Members adult rates: Weekdays $23. Weekends $25. (See website for dis counted senior, group, and children’s rates.) Admission is free to all visitors on the first Thursday of each month with advance tickets. Hours: Open 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Wednesday through Monday. Closed Tuesdays and major holidays. Dining: The 1919 café serves light meals and refreshments. Tea is served in the Rose Garden Tea Room. For tea reservations, call 626-683-8131. Enjoy Chinese cuisine in the Chinese Garden’s Freshwater Dumpling and Noodle House and specialty coffees in the Red Car coffee shop. Huntington Store: Open 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Wednesday through Monday, the store carries a variety of books, prints, note cards, jewelry, UNIQUE EDITION OF JOHN MUIR’S home decor, toys, and gift items related to The Hunt ington’s collec tions. Pur chases help finance the institu tion. Store information: 626-405-2142. WRITINGS ACQUIRED elebrate spring with your family or friends by enjoying an elegant Lisa Blackburn, Editor/Photographer Easter Brunch at The Huntington on Saturday and Sunday, April New acquisitions also include a sumptuous monograph on camellias, a manuscript Lori Ann Achzet, Designer Thea M. Page, Contributing writer C 15–16, under the dome of the beautiful Rose Hills Foundation containing lectures by a close member of Galileo’s circle, and other works. Garden Court. Take a stroll in the gardens while you’re here—the roses will be coming into bloom—and see what’s new in the galleries and Senior Staff exhibitions.
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History, Race and Gender in the Science Fiction of Octavia Estelle
HISTORY, RACE AND GENDER IN THE SCIENCE FICTION OF OCTAVIA ESTELLE BUTLER A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree Master of Arts In the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by Ben Davis Jr., B. S. Ed. ***** The Ohio State University 1992 Master's Examination Committee: Approved by Christian K. Zacher Patrick B. Mullen ~ef~ College of English Copyrig ht by Ben Davis Jr. 1992 To my mother and father, Leontyne and Ben i i ACKNOWLEOOEMENTS My sincerest thanks, appreciation, and gratitude to everyone who has encouraged me and helped me realize this graduate thesis. To my very first literature professor, the late Dr. Stanley J. Kahrl, my mentor and friend who instilled in me the drive for excellence and love for the written word; Dr. Christian Zacher, who took a chance on me to guide me through my research and my writing on this project; Dr. Patrick Mullen, my second reader and guide; my closest friends, Albert, David, James Daniels and James Moorer, who are always behind me; my brothers Michael and Thomas, whose love and admiration I will forever cherish; Viola Newton, who is both a wonderful colleague and friend; and Octavia Estelle Butler, the beauty and magic of whose words have inspired me with the means to do my work. iii VITA April 28, 1962 Born - Cleveland, Ohio 1990 - 1991 Graduate Research Associateship, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS0 FSTUDY Major Field: English Studies in: Twentieth Century American Literature, African American Literature, and Science Fiction iv TABLEOFCONTENTS DEDiCATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii ViTA iv CHAPTER PAGE I.
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Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and Scifi Family Values
Chapter 14 Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and Sci-Fi Family Values Joy James Introduction Th rough fi ction, Octavia Butler (1947–2006) infl uences the political landscapes of literature, critical race, and feminist theories. 1 Her writings discussed here are low-tech. Prevalent in science fi ction (SF) fi lm and liter- ature, human/robotic inventions are largely absent in Butler’s work. Most present in her oeuvre is what is most missing in American SF: the dispos- sessed black female protagonist as “captive maternal.” Th e raison d’être for the captive maternal is her own survival and the fl ourishing of her family and community. Th e captive maternal is identifi ed by four quali- ties: nontransferable agency; combative peer relations, usually with priv- ileged males; a radical vision for life without trauma; and the desire and capacity to “love” through familial and communal ties that cross boundar- ies and sustain freedom. As spectrum, the captive maternal displaces nar- ratives of agency dominated by masculinized master races. Butler off ers this embattled maternal as the primary agent responsible for stability and sanctuary despite dystopia, slavery, exile, war, and racial-sexual vio- lence. Th is protagonist, in speculative fi ction that parallels and opposes neo-slavery, refl ects the subordinate cultures of all worlds. Captivity cre- ated the black matrix, yet the matrix reproduces resistance detrimental to the conditions from which it emerged. Butler’s work cannot default into whiteness because of the constant specter of racism. Given its legacy in the half-a-millennium histories of black captivity in the Western world, the apocalypse the captive maternal resists is familiar.
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An Interview with Octavia E. Butler Author(S): Randall Kenan Source: Callaloo, Vol
An Interview With Octavia E. Butler Author(s): Randall Kenan Source: Callaloo, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 495-504 Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931654 Accessed: 10-01-2016 19:54 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Callaloo. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 152.2.176.242 on Sun, 10 Jan 2016 19:54:56 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AN INTERVIEW WITH OCTAVIA E. BUTLER By Randall Kenan OctaviaE. Butler is somethingof a phenomenon.Since 1976 she has publishednine novels, morethan any otherblack woman in NorthAmerica, and evenmore amazing: She writes science fiction. Having won all the majorSF awards, (a Nebula and two Hugos), she has gained a substantialcult following, as well as criticalacclaim, particularly for her1979 novel, Kindred, reissuedin 1988 in theprestigious Beacon Black Women Writers Series. Kindred is the tale of DanaFranklin, a blackwoman from an interracialmarriage in LA in 1976, who is mysteriously pluckedback in time on a numberof occasionsto 1824 Marylandand to a moraldilemma in- volving her white ancestor.A bookoften comparedto Metamorphosis for its uncannilysuc- cessfulblend offact and fantasy, it is consideredby manyto bea modernclassic.
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Octavia Butler and Virginia Hamilton: Black Women Writers and Science Fiction Author(S): Gregory Jerome Hampton and Wanda M
Octavia Butler and Virginia Hamilton: Black Women Writers and Science Fiction Author(s): Gregory Jerome Hampton and Wanda M. Brooks Source: The English Journal, Vol. 92, No. 6 (Jul., 2003), pp. 70-74 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650538 Accessed: 14-08-2017 19:37 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The English Journal This content downloaded from 130.157.139.112 on Mon, 14 Aug 2017 19:37:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Octavia Butler and Virginia Hamilton: BlackWomen Writers and Science Fiction GREGORY JEROME HAMPTON AND WANDA M. BROOKS frican American literature has always had elements of what many would refer to as science fiction. As is common in a significant number of books written by and about African Americans, science fiction has historically been focused on narratives of the alienated and/or marginalized "other." U In African American literature for children and adults, many authors approach the themes of alienation and "otherness" through the gen- res of historical and realistic fiction as well as biography.
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Black Female Agencyand Octavia Butler‟S Construction of Black Womanhood
PATTERNS IN THE PARABLES: BLACK FEMALE AGENCYAND OCTAVIA BUTLER‟S CONSTRUCTION OF BLACK WOMANHOOD A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Algie Vincent Williams III May, 2011 Examining Committee Members: Eli Goldblatt, Advisory Chair, English Samuel Delany, English Michael Kaufmann, English Patricia Melzer, External Member, Women‟s Studies i ABSTRACT This project argues that Octavia‟s Butler‟s construction of the black woman characters is unique within the pantheon of late eighties African-American writers primarily through Butler‟s celebration of black female physicality and the agency the black body provides. The project is divided into five sections beginning with an intensive examination of Butler‟s ur-character, Anyanwu. This character is vitally important in discussing Butler‟s canon because she embodies the attributes and thematic issues that run throughout the author‟s work, specifically, the author‟s argument that black woman are provided opportunity through their bodies. Chapter two addresses the way black women‟s femininity is judged: their sexual activity. In this chapter, I explore one facet of Octavia Butler‟s narrative examination of sexual co-option and her subsequent implied challenge to definitions of feminine morality through the character Lilith who appears throughout Butler‟s Xenogenesis trilogy. Specifically, I explore this subject using Harriet Jacobs‟ seminal autobiography and slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as the prism in which I historically focus the conversation. In chapter three, I move the discussion into an exploration of black motherhood. Much like the aforementioned challenge to femininity vis-à-vis sexual morality, Octavia Butler often challenges and interrogates the traditional definition of motherhood, specifically, the relationship between mother and daughter.
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