Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels and the “Boomerang” of African American History

Beyond A New World in Space: Critical Astral Frontiers in Octavia Butler and Adam Garnet Jones

“…However, the trope is reinterpreted at the service of a postcolonial utopian enterprise: the creation of a radically new world without the social injustices and oppressions that prevail on Earth. Butler uses space exploration as a device to create a potential space of freedom, safety, and joy for human beings, 'her implicit statement being that a truly equal, sharing, and caring society among humans may not be possible upon the Earth we have created' (Allen 2009(Allen , 1363. Nonetheless, Butler is never purely utopian in her visioning of a just future for everyone, emphasizing the need for struggle and significant adaptation alongside mutual aid and peaceful cooperation.…”

“…Nonetheless, Butler is never purely utopian in her visioning of a just future for everyone, emphasizing the need for struggle and significant adaptation alongside mutual aid and peaceful cooperation. Space settlement, then, serves as a literary device that enables us to imagine a means of escape and a radically new world that 'can provide as a prophetic tool for change' (Allen 2009(Allen , 1355, but also as a tool for apprehending the continued operations of colonial rhetoric in future visioning.…”

“…For Earthseed and Lauren, the radical open-endedness of space manifests itself as rather an empowering tool for marginalized collectives, a means of escaping terrestrial power structures that have worsened intensely and rendered the lives of gendered and racialized subjects even more precarious. Going to space embodies an escape from what Marlene D. Allen terms the "boomerang" of history, according to which those groups who have historically been disenfranchised always run the highest risk to be disenfranchised again when the next crisis hits (Allen 2009(Allen , 1354. In order to escape this boomerang and 'project the ideas of African American freedom in the future' (Allen 2009(Allen , 1358, Earthseed not only needs to engage with the future of widely facilitated space travel, but must also work through the history of faced oppressions, acknowledging that the past is neither dislocated from the present nor entirely determining of it.…”

Seeding a Black Feminist Future on the Horizon of a Third Reconstruction: The Abolitionist Politics of Self-Care in Octavia Butler’sParable of the Sower

“…1 From her many hand-written affirmations routinely on display for the public and some of which have been digitized, it is well documented that Butler practiced her own form of almost daily self-care (Bates 2017). Most recently, Butler's work has gained significant posthumous attention amongst a wide variety of academics with the publication of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler (Hampton and Parker 2020); however, her appeal to Black Studies scholars, particularly in regards to Afro-futurism, is much more long standing (Allen 2009;Calvin 2008;Cox 2015;Davis 2018;Dery 1994;Hernton 1985;Jamieson and Bailey 2018;Lloyd 2016).…”