Black Feminism and the SciFi of Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler's novels often begin with the question, 'how am I going to survive?' In short order, they usually ask next: what is trying to kill me?' In Butler's hands, these two questions produce theories of power and resistance, anarchy and tyranny, the death of planets and the birth of species. For the Black women at the center of Butler's novels, race and gender are explicitly inseparable from these questions, naming the violent systems imposed by an antagonistic world and the imperatives which give rise to strategies of response. At this intersection, Butler explores the fiercely practical and interpersonal politics of survival that women like her have had to fashion since the birth of the modern world. And with grim clarity, Butler invents worlds capable of holding a mirror to this one, extrapolating entire systems from those daily threats which test the limits of what can be thought and known. Are 'race' and 'gender' used to categorize humanity, or are they the tools used to invent the very category of 'the human'? Is culture constrained by our biology or is 'biology' a cultural construction? Can humanity harness our collective intelligence to avert the end of the world? Or is our collective intelligence what's killing us? These novels evoke a long tradition of Black feminist community organizing and have inspired contemporary strategies of organizing in turn. And they join Black feminist cultural theorists in untangling the predicaments of the 19th-21st centuries, not flinching at apocalyptic visions of futures we have already failed to prevent. Studying both of these Black feminist traditions alongside four of Octavia Butler's novels, we ask how such strategies of knowing and doing can possibly relate to one another, and what use we can put them to in the classroom and beyond.