Mark’s Story

This chapter begins the study of the canonical Gospels with the earliest Gospel written rather than the first in the Christian canon: the Gospel of Mark. After offering basic background on authorship, provenance, and date of composition, this chapter outlines the historical and political contexts of Roman Palestine in the first century CE. This introduction leads into a discussion of Mark’s apocalyptic perspective and presentation of Jesus’s mission as a cosmic battle. Following this background information, the chapter offers a literary overview of the Gospel and explores major themes and passages, including Jesus’s characterization, the Parable of the Sower and minor characters, Jesus’s time in Jerusalem, and the various endings of the Gospel of Mark. The chapter ends with a conclusion describing Mark’s challenge for its readers to choose between fear and faith.

Crip Collectivity Beyond Neoliberalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

The importance of Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower continues to crystalize, as Butler’s prescient imagining of urban California torn apart by neoliberal divestment comes to fruition. Following in the space opened up by Black feminist scholarship on Butler, the present essay examines her relevance beyond literary and cultural studies. I argue that Parable is a Black feminist crip theorization of political economy that diagnoses the disabling conditions of precarity under neoliberalism and also prescribes collectivity for crip and mad survival. Neoliberalism describes a global stage of advanced capitalism wherein governments are both incentivized and disciplined into enforcing economic policies that include privatization, deregulation, and market liberalization. As Jodi Melamed defines it, neoliberalism requires a certain kind of political governance, that puts the interests of business over the well-being of people (2011). Neoliberal governance engenders what I call “disabling contradictions,” yet the blame for conditions of precarity is deflected onto bodyminds themselves. In Parable of the Sower, Butler theorizes these disabling contradictions of neoliberal governance under advanced capitalism, drawing into focus the political economic systems that cause suffering. Parable also depicts strategies for crip and mad survival that are made possible through the conscious creation of community and networks of solidarity that counter the neoliberal state’s devaluation of bodyminds. Gathering to read and discuss the novel, rather than a distraction from the crises, furthers the emergence of crip and mad collectivities. As such, it is an urgent and timely practice for building futures for crip and mad people.

‘A racist challenge might force us apart’: divergence, reliance and empathy in Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

This article aims to analyze racial issues in the resistance community depicted in Parable of the Sower (1993), by Octavia Butler, named ‘Acorn’. By researching the critical approaches to this novel, I observed that, as much as they admit race as a force that interferes in the relation between offenders and offended, they have not gone further in questioning how the variety and the complexity of the previous backgrounds of these racialized subjects cannot be ignored and homogenized in the establishment of bonds among the offended as well. As I aim to demonstrate, the world experience carried by each character, determined especially by race and social class, helps meditating on their own asymmetrical positions and showing how their empathy towards one another has to be built and (re-)negotiated all the time.

Political Gutting, Crushed Life and Poetic Justice

This chapter will return to Woolf’s Three Guineas and political agency and look at Butler’s Kindred and Parable of the Sower. Thechapter has three sections, each addresses different types of political horror. First there is a return to racial and colonial terror in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989), Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Then the chapter takes us to the outcasts and powerful lost souls in man-eat-men environments in The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2016), Tigers are not Afraid (Issa Lopez, 2017) and Songs My Brothers Taught Me (Chloé Zhao, 2015). In Atlantics (Mati Diop 2019) the sea off the coast of Senegal raises many ghosts from the past and the present. The chapter concludes with a section of eco-horror through the eyes of female directors: Spoor (Agnieska Holland 2017) is an allegory of the feminist backlash in contemporary Poland, wrapped in a hunting tale. Little Joe (Jessica Hausner 2019) and Glass Garden (Shin Sue-won 2017) are contemporary Frankenstein stories with idiosyncratic female scientists.

Evolutionary psychology

This chapter explores the importation into science fiction of evolutionary psychology, including earlier schools such as Social Darwinism and sociobiology. Social Darwinism motivates an anti-utopian tendency to forecast a state of future decadence that can be arrested only by the re-activation of dormant evolutionary mechanisms. This pattern may be familiar enough from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), but is less easily perceived in Octavia Butler’s sequence, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), which predicts a new evolutionary lineage for homo sapiens emerging from a future in which the USA is a failed state. The authority of evolutionary psychology is challenged in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985), which satirizes the sociobiological paradigm by taking to the point of absurdity evolutionary explanations for human aggression. Science fiction can, moreover, escape hackneyed Social Darwinist discourses by drawing upon alternative evolutionary psychologies. Naomi Mitchison’s future utopia in Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) draws upon attachment theory to offer a renewed feminist ethic of compassion and imaginative understanding, while also estranging our dominant ethical systems.