Fear of a Black planet: Climate apocalypse, Anthropocene futures and Black social thought

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed.

The Art of Rambling: Journeys through Space and Time with Mary Kingsley, Rose Macaulay, Ursula Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison and Octavia Butler

In “The Art of Rambling: Journeys Through Space and Time”, Sarah LeFanu will look at the travels and travel-writings of, predominantly, Mary Kingsley and Rose Macaulay, and will boldly suggest some connections with the science fictional spacewomen and time-travellers of the second wave of feminism. She will talk about five travelling women whose lives span over one hundred years, and look at some of the connections between them in their lives and in their writing. By focusing on the experience of the five authors in a larger socio-cultural and literary context, LeFanu will trace the implications of writing and travelling vis-à-vis the intersectionality of one’s personal commitments and motivations, with the aim to discovering how these are inflected by questions of gender and gender bias, consequently bearing upon the shape of modern discourses of women travel and travel writing. While each of the women travelled in different modes and to different places, for every one of them the imaginative worlds of their childhoods inspired them to engage with the world outside, an engagement that was not just personal but was also profoundly political.

A parábola do semeador: Octavia Butler

Resenha do livro A Parábola do Semeador, da autora americana Octavia Butler, traduzido pela primeira vez no Brasil em 2017.

Afrofuturism and Transhumanism: New Insights into the African American Identity in Octavia Butler’s Dawn

Afrofuturism offers visions about different aspects of African Americans’ future. Combining the elements of Afrofuturism and Transhumanism can allow new and vast paths to argue about African Americans’ future. Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is among those authors who wanted a better future for her people. In Dawn (1987), she presents the future of an African American protagonist – Lilith, whose identity is scientifically fictionalised and intermingled with hope for a better future. This study critically examines the traits and the role of the protagonist. It aims to investigate how Butler’s transhumanist protagonist’s portrayal is necessary to pursue the demarginalisation of African American’s future identity. In this respect, we adopt the Afrofuturistic sense of utilising knowledge and science of Ytasha Womack in discussing Afrofuturism, as well as Nick Bostrom’s transhumanistic perspective on the necessity of body enhancements to extend humanism.

Sustainable Stories: Managing Climate Change with Literature

Literary and cultural texts are essential in shaping emotional and intellectual dispositions toward the human potential for a sustainable transformation of society. Due to its appeal to the human imagination and human empathy, literature can enable readers for sophisticated understandings of social and ecological justice. An overabundance of catastrophic near future scenarios largely prevents imagining the necessary transition toward a socially responsible and ecologically mindful future as a non-violent and non-disastrous process. The paper argues that transition stories that narrate the rebuilding of the world in the midst of crisis are much better instruments in bringing about a human “mindshift” (Göpel) than disaster stories. Transition stories, among them the Parable novels by Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), offer feasible ideas about how to orchestrate economic and social change. The analysis of recent American, Canadian, British, and German near future novels—both adult and young adult fictions—sheds light on those aspects best suited for effecting behavioral change in recipients’ minds: exemplary ecologically sustainable characters and actions, companion quests, cooperative communities, sources of epistemological innovation and spiritual resilience, and an ethics and aesthetics of repair.

Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to COVID-19

I examine the predictive powers of the political science fictions of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood for understanding the patriarchal—or men-dominant—dynamics of the politics of pandemics in the twenty-first century. Like her literary followers in post-apocalyptic plague literature, Butler and Atwood, Shelley foresaw that the twenty-first century would be the age of lethal pandemics. Their post-apocalyptic fictions also projected the ways that patriarchal and authoritarian forms of populism could shape the cultural circumstances that can turn a local outbreak of a new and deadly contagious disease, like COVID-19, into a politically chaotic and economically devastating global plague. Modern feminist political science fiction born of Shelley's great pandemic novel The Last Man (1826) is seemingly clairvoyant not because of any supernatural powers of the authors but rather because of their studied attention to the wisdom of plague literature, the lessons of epidemic history, and the political dynamics of patriarchy and populism.

Postmodern Slave Narratives

This chapter considers the representation of time in postmodern slave narratives. It argues they work through a style of black humour within which the politics of slavery are mediated in complex and ambiguous ways. Starting from the comic fiction of Ishmael Reed, it discusses how scientific discourses turn racial politics into a complicated affair in the novels of Octavia Butler. It finds a similar tension in the recursive fictions of Toni Morrison, where time frequently circles back on itself. This chapter’s second section considers how such inversions are played out in the films of Quentin Tarantino, arguing the disjunctive temporality of his historical films is marked by systematic invocations of antipodean space. Such strategic forms of anachronism and disorientation are associated with the politics of the Obama era, which combined traditional pragmatism with recognition of how transnational pressures were pushing questions about slavery’s historical legacy in a new direction.

‘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.