T H E H U Ntin Gton L Ibrary, a Rt C Ollection S, an D B Otan Ical G Arden S
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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. -
Afrofuturism: the World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture
AFROFUTURISMAFROFUTURISM THE WORLD OF BLACK SCI-FI AND FANTASY CULTURE YTASHA L. WOMACK Chicago Afrofuturism_half title and title.indd 3 5/22/13 3:53 PM AFROFUTURISMAFROFUTURISM THE WORLD OF BLACK SCI-FI AND FANTASY CULTURE YTASHA L. WOMACK Chicago Afrofuturism_half title and title.indd 3 5/22/13 3:53 PM AFROFUTURISM Afrofuturism_half title and title.indd 1 5/22/13 3:53 PM Copyright © 2013 by Ytasha L. Womack All rights reserved First edition Published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated 814 North Franklin Street Chicago, Illinois 60610 ISBN 978-1-61374-796-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism : the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture / Ytasha L. Womack. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61374-796-4 (trade paper) 1. Science fiction—Social aspects. 2. African Americans—Race identity. 3. Science fiction films—Influence. 4. Futurologists. 5. African diaspora— Social conditions. I. Title. PN3433.5.W66 2013 809.3’8762093529—dc23 2013025755 Cover art and design: “Ioe Ostara” by John Jennings Cover layout: Jonathan Hahn Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN Interior art: John Jennings and James Marshall (p. 187) Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1 I dedicate this book to Dr. Johnnie Colemon, the first Afrofuturist to inspire my journey. I dedicate this book to the legions of thinkers and futurists who envision a loving world. CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................................. ix Introduction ............................................................................ 1 1 Evolution of a Space Cadet ................................................ 3 2 A Human Fairy Tale Named Black .................................. -
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. -
A Cyborg Manifesto
A Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. -
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. -
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. -
Université De Montréal Shapeshifting in Octavia Butler's Wild Seed And
Université de Montréal Shapeshifting in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon par Fahimeh Payam Askari Département de littératures et de langues du monde Section études anglaises Mémoire présenté à la faculté des Arts et des Sciences En vue de l'obtention du grade de Maîtrise en études Anglaises April 2019 © Fahimeh Payam Askari, 2019 2 Abstract: This study examines shapeshifting as a post-colonial metaphor of race, gender and resistance in the novels Wild Seed and Lagoon. In both science fiction novels, the conceptions of race and gender are highlighted through portrayals of shapeshifting and the post-human. From this position, this study explores the ways in which novelists, Octavia Butler, in Wild Seed, and Nnedi Okorafor, in Lagoon in particular, deploy shapeshifting, that is, the blurring and destabilization of boundaries, as a tool for aesthetic and socio-political engagement in postcolonial and post- independence narratives. In both novels, the technology of the immortal shapeshifters does not threaten the nature/culture nor does it serve colonialism. Indeed, science and knowledge are productive and shared among people. Shapeshifting is a narrative device in postcolonial science fiction that functions as a mode of resistance against colonialism, oppression and imperialism in different historical contexts in both novels. This study demonstrates how shapeshifting symbolically facilitates a process of decolonization by resisting and altering received constructions of gender and race. Furthermore, it explores effective sites of decolonization aiming at demonstrating “resistant” identities represented as an immortal shapeshifter in Wild Seed and an extraterrestrial in Lagoon. Wild Seed and Lagoon, deploy the juxtaposition of traditional magical elements with science fictional materials, and the way the shapeshifting protagonists establish justice in society. -
OCTAVIA BUTLER NOW J21COLORED Copy THE+
★ ★ 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. -
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. -
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. -
Female Identity and Race in Contemporary Afrofuturist Narratives
Université de Montréal Female Identity and Race in Contemporary Afrofuturist Narratives: Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler par Ella Boccara Département de littératures et de langues du monde Faculté des Arts et Sciences Mémoire présenté en vue de l’obtention du grade de maîtrise en études anglaises Août 2020 © Ella Boccara, 2020 Université de Montréal Département de littératures et de langues du monde, Faculté des arts et sciences Ce mémoire intitulé Female Identity and Race in Contemporary Afrofuturist Narratives: Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler Présenté par Ella Boccara A été évalué par un jury composé des personnes suivantes Jane Malcolm Présidente-rapporteur Heike Harting Directrice de recherche Michael Eberle Sinatra Membre du jury i Résumé Ce mémoire explore les notions de race et d’identité féminine à travers le récit afro- futuriste Wild Seed d’Octavia Butler. Décrit comme le nouveau genre de la ‘fiction spéculative’ par les théoriciens universitaires, l’afro-futurisme joint le spéculatif au réalisme afin d’explorer les conjonctions entre les diasporas africaines, l’écriture africaine américaine et les technologies modernes. Cette thèse propose une analyse critique et théorique du roman Wild Seed d’Octavia Butler, en se concentrant particulièrement sur ses divers concepts et ses allégories historiques. Plutôt que d’ignorer le rôle que jouent les notions de race et d’identité dans la science-fiction, Butler les met en avant dans le roman Wild Seed et les questionne en adressant des sujets tels que l’après-colonisation, la tyrannie intime, l’hybridité, la différence, l’altérité, et l’identité. Dans le premier chapitre, j’examinerais tout particulièrement l’influence de la domination de la colonisation patriarcale occidental et l’occidentalisation des africains-américains. -
Finding Moments of Rupture in Monàe's Metropolis
FINDING MOMENTS OF RUPTURE IN MONÀE’S METROPOLIS : A HYBRID TRADITION A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English By Darieus Antonino Za Gara II, B.A. Washington, DC April 15, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Darieus Antonino Za Gara II All Rights Reserved ii FINDING MOMENTS OF RUPTURE IN MONÀE’S METROPOLIS: A HYBRID TRADITION Darieus Antonino Za Gara II, B.A. Thesis Advisor: Brian Hochman , Ph.D . ABSTRACT My thesis asserts that there is a definite stylistic and thematic connection between author Octavia Butler and the performer Janelle Monáe. The association between them is founded on a black feminist tradition that uses hybrid characters and scenarios to counter typically white male heteronormative narratives. Studying how both artists construct feminist hybrid characters is important for two reasons: first, it adds to small but burgeoning area of study surrounding the figure of Janelle Monáe. Second, it calls attention to a mostly unnoticed literary legacy that unites Butler and Monáe. Through the use of hybridized characters, this thesis finds that both artists disrupt and reorient ordinary cultural arrangements of race, gender, class, and sexuality by warping the meaning of ritualized behavior. iii For Darieus and Belinda Za Gara. Thank you for making that deal with me as a child, for opening up the world of literature to me. To Christina Duran. For bearing through this past year, for listening to me recite the same section over and over again.