Octavia Butler's Legacy: Black Feminism and Beyond @surveyaalit - Tumblr Blog

WORKS CITED

Octavia Butler's impact on the world of science fiction and Black literature is unquestioned, and her effect on future generations of writers (and readers) is incalculable. Below you will find an annotated bibliography of sources to enhance your own understanding of the multifaceted ways that Butler's work has been examined and critiqued from a wide variety of lenses. Should you wish to familiarize yourself with the content discussed, the citations also function as links to the source material.

Cowen, Tyler. “A Sci-fi Radical You Should Read.” Slate Magazine. Slate, Mar. 2006. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

Cowen provides a thoughtful and complete analysis of Butler’s work in a modern historical context. The background information provided about Butler’s life and the inferred and explicit connections made between her own life experiences and the thematic elements that dominate her written work are both relevant and respectful. Cowen is also careful to tie specific elements of the Xenogenesis trilogy (described in the article as “Butler’s masterpiece”) to the overarching themes of race, sexuality, and power plays that dominate Butler’s entire body of work, while simultaneously positing questions to the reader that interrogate the reader’s own perspective on what it means to be an outsider, or to be complicit within a dominant power structure.

Davis, Marcia. “Octavia Butler: A Lonely, Bright Star of the Sci-Fi Universe.” Washington Post. The Washington Post, 28 Feb. 2006. Web. 15 Dec. 2013.

In a tradition that is disturbingly familiar in popular accounts of Octavia Butler’s life and lived accomplishments, Davis’s article on Butler’s contributions to the world of science fiction is riddled with references to her supposed loneliness and inability to connect with other people. Although the article makes multiple references to Butler’s academic accomplishments and the intensely appreciated impact that her books had on an audience starved for alternative perspectives in science fiction (i.e. perspectives other than white and male), it also dwells on Butler’s death alone in her home in a way that is intended to emphasize an understanding of her as a “lonely, bright star” instead of a woman living her life as she intended to live it, surrounded by the people she wanted and liked, and few others. Yet the article is beneficial for the insight it gives into the minds of those who were close to Butler, her own biographical information that largely informed her writing and her protagonists’ relationships to systems of power and systematic inequality.

Due, Tananarive. “And Still Sci-fi’s Octavia E. Butler Rises: A Graphic Adaptation. A Literary Society. Is a ‘Kindred’ Movie Next?” TheGrio. MSNBC, 29 June 2013. Web. 15 Dec. 2013.

Due’s emphasis on the continued legacy of Butler’s works in a modern world for academics and consumers of popular culture alike speaks to Due’s firm belief in the necessity of Butler’s works. Due lays out a brief summary of Butler’s contributions to the world of science fiction and Black literature (mainly a who’s-who of Butler’s more impactful and financially successful novels) before delving into the numerous ways in which Butler’s work is not only still relevant but vital to the continued appreciation and understanding of race, gender, and sexuality themes in literature.

Fink, Marty. “AIDS Vampires: Reimagining Illness in Octavia Butler’s “Fledgling”“ Science Fiction Studies 37.3 (2010): 416-32. Print.

Fink analyzes the ways in which Butler tackles the implications of the AIDS epidemic in her novels by mirroring the way that the public reacted to the threat of communicable disease (namely by isolating and shaming those who are affected) in her novel “Fledgling.” Fink claims Butler uses vampires to metaphorically represent the racialized and sexualized fears of the predatory unknown that drove the intense backlash against those who were infected with HIV/AIDS, and believes that Butler’s treatment of vampires in her literary works was intended to address and alter the reactive script that society has by and large adhered to when dealing with those who are living with HIV/AIDS. Because Butler’s protagonists break multiple binaried forms of thought and expectations (namely through gender and race — a novel that follows and chronicles the exploits of a Black female vampire is already transgressing multiple ingrained expectations about the nature of vampire lore) and because they themselves are allowed to have agency and to be reconfigured as symbiotic as opposed to predatory beings, her representation of vampires is seen by Fink as a call for understanding and education, thus furthering Butler’s work towards inclusivity and the expansion of unnecessarily restrictive binaries.

Foster, Guy Mark. “”Do I Look Like Someone You Can Come Home to From Where You May Be Going?”: Re-Mapping Interracial Anxiety in Octavia E. Butler’s “Kindred”“African American Review 41.1 (2007): 143-64. JSTOR. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

In this analysis of the interracial relationship(s) present in Butler’s “Kindred,” Foster argues convincingly that Butler’s representation of a successful and ultimately non-damaging interracial relationship with her protagonist and her protagonist’s white husband is ignored by the racially-conscious literary critics who would ordinarily scrutinize a representation of interracial relationships that did not feature racism as a prominent sub-characteristic. Foster believes that this is the case because “Kindred” also contains another representation of an interracial relationship, but the second relationship takes place between a master and an enslaved woman and includes rape, abuse, and ultimate suicide, thus successfully enacting all of the narrative tropes that are looked for in critiques of interracial relationships. In the context of Foster’s analysis, this enactment allows the protagonist’s modern interracial relationship to be depicted as successful and as healthy for both parties, and provides a fertile background for Butler to subtly contrast internalized racism with its more abject counterpart by using each couple as a means to throw the racism in their separate dynamics into sharp relief.

Fox, Margalit. “Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 58.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 01 Mar. 2006. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

Octavia Butler’s New York Times obituary provides a perspective of her life that is interesting when viewed outside of an academic context; the aspects of her life that are considered noteworthy or important enough to be included in a catch-all description of her accomplishments differ significantly from the academic lexicon that reveres her as a literary giant. The New York Times, on the other hand, chose to emphasize elements of her life that are politically notable (mainly her presence in the mainly white and male genre of science fiction, making her a historically noteworthy trailblazer) and personally tragic (mainly the descriptions of her as “paralytically shy” with a house filled with “tattered discards of white families”) in order to craft an image of her as someone who overcame personal disadvantages in order to achieve financial and literary success. This description cannot be divorced from the popular ideal of the American Dream, in which a disadvantaged protagonist succeeds against all odds due to a strong work ethic (another element emphasized in the piece, which points out that “she rose each day at 2 a.m. to write. She supported herself through a series of dystopian jobs: dishwasher, telemarketer, potato chips inspector”). Whether Butler would agree with a portrait of her life that fits so neatly into an archetypal mold not unlike the many she sought to smash throughout her career is a question that cannot be answered.

Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks in Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 82-87. JSTOR. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.

Govan is primarily concerned with tracing an enduring network of themes and recurring patterns through all of Butler’s published Science Fiction works. Govan’s reasons for this are straightforward: she believes that when viewed as a comprehensive collection with a unified perspective and intended message, Butler’s works are not only tied in with each other but also with a thematic whole that represents Butler’s primary motivation as a writer and as an activist. Govan argues that the primary theme that can be strung through all of Butler’s works is the struggle for power: between men and women, Black and white, rich and poor. She uses a series of examples in which Butler’s traditionally Black female heroines are each matched with a person or set of circumstances that challenges their ability to have their own agency (whether physical, spiritual, or intellectual) and control over their circumstances, then traces how each individual protagonist successfully or unsuccessfully attempts to circumnavigate those restrictions to gain ultimate control and power over their own lives. Read as a commentary on Butler’s work as a whole, Govan’s analysis provides a unique perspective on Butler’s thematic approach to science fiction as well as the female protagonist’s struggle for agency.

Helford, Elyce Rae. “”Would You Really Rather Die Than Bear My Young?”: The Construction of Gender, Race, and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”“ African American Review 28.2 (1994): 259-71. JSTOR. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

In this analysis of the raced and gendered implications of the unequal inter-species relationships in Butler’s “Bloodchild,” Helford directly compares the relationship between alien and human beings to the institution of slavery. Helford acknowledges Butler’s own discomfort with that representation, referring specifically to an interview in which Butler rejected that interpretation and articulated her own conception of the relationship as a symbiotic rather than an enslaved one, but Helford makes the compelling point that authors do not have hegemonic control over the ways that their works are interpreted. Throughout her analysis, Helford relies on an enormous body of previously published scholarship to inform and engage with her own interpretation of the racialized politics of human/alien interactions, which does not necessarily emerge in its concrete form until two-thirds of the way through her work. Helford believes that the racialized dynamics behind the alien-human relationships present in the book bear their own political weight in an American climate that has been taught to view female Blackness as inherently submissive and subjected to white mastery and violation. The fact that Butler deliberately inverted that dynamic to depict a forced male pregnancy is taken as evidence by Helford that Butler was consciously engaging with and troubling traditional views of race-based politics in historical representations of slavery.

King, Jamilah. “Octavia Butler’s Message to the Grassroots.” Colorlines. COLORLINES, 11 Sept. 2013. Web. 15 Dec. 2013.

King’s piece serves as an effective exploration of an activist-minded literary group that takes inspiration directly from Butler’s works in order to effect social change through writing. The matter-of-fact and journalistic tone of the piece affords it an ease of accessibility that encourages participation — which is exactly the goal of the group. The ultimate goal of a group of committed science fiction readers, writers, and activists is the production of “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements,” which will actively engage with Butler’s legacy of science fiction writing and stories that map current racial, cultural, and gendered issues onto the unfamiliar terrain of space and alien encounters in order to divorce the issue from the context and write towards a different understanding and, perhaps, a solution. Thus the documentation of a group of young writers determined to uphold her legacy while adding to the tradition of work that Butler began is both incredibly important and well-researched, with specific details on where the group can be found and where they are in the process of obtaining the resources necessary to make their vision a reality.

Meadows, Foz. “Romance Cooties: Women and Science Fiction.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 03 June 2013. Web. 15 Dec. 2013.

Meadows’ critique of the male-dominated science fiction genre attempts to demonstrate the validity of science fiction novels and narratives that contain or celebrate family or romantic connections by listing a series of incredibly successful female science fiction novelists. Butler is name-dropped as one in a series of successful women writers, but her work is not extensively explored so much as hung as an emblem of female success in a male-dominated field. This popular piece merits an inclusion in a bibliography about Octavia Butler’s works precisely because it illustrates so well the role that she is so frequently assigned: as an archetypal member of a denigrated group attempting to break the boundaries of science fiction. This is not to say that the critique of a male-dominated genre should not be done or should not attempt to list the number of successful female writers who have made their imprint on the genre, but it is once again important to note that despite Octavia Butler’s consistent questioning of racial dynamics as well as fluid and queered sexualities, she is most frequently remembered and lauded in popular (white) publications for her femaleness.

Morris, Susana M. “Black Girls Are From the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40.3-4 (2012): 146-66. Print.

Morris opens her exploration of Octavia Butler’s role in the Afrofuturist Feminism movement by contextualizing the contemporary state of popular vampire lore as both de-fanged and predominantly white (“contemporary” in this context meaning 2012, and “popular vampire lore” referring to the popular novel series Twilight and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Morris then moves into a brief history of vampire lore and the various ways in which vampiric literature has been used to make political points about bodily difference over the decades since its inception, before turning to Afrofuturism and its impact on Butler’s writing. Morris is implicitly concerned with tracing the rise of Afrofuturism as a movement for Black writers attempting to find a place for people of color in a landscape that had been historically written as predominantly white and male, and she situates Butler as a game-changer and a feminist voice within the Afrofuturist movement, thereby using Butler’s own conception of vampire literature to trouble traditional narratives and pioneer the Afrofuturist feminist genre. Morris then calls for a return to literary roots that emphasize racial and gendered diversity and holds Butler’s works up as examples of the direction that the field itself should take.

North, Anna. “Octavia Butler, SciFi Pioneer.” Jezebel. N.p., 15 Mar. 2011. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

This obituary for Butler (written for the self-proclaimed feminist pop culture website Jezebel) exemplifies the many ways in which feminist writers and readers who are not themselves implicitly connected to Butler’s legacy of Black feminism can underwrite and overlook Butler’s racial politics in favor of a pseudo-uplifting pro-woman message that emphasizes her attempts to enter a male-dominated field without dwelling on the fact that it was also a predominantly white male-dominated field. It is vital that such works be read, discussed, and identified in order to continue the understanding of Octavia Butler’s work in its appropriate historical and cultural context. This discussion would be impossible without clear proof of the many ways that white feminists have attempted to adopt and co-opt the works of Black feminists and feminists of color underneath a banner that has historically prioritized whiteness. Even the last line of the obituary, which reads “[Butler’s] perseverance in and mastery of a field dominated by white men can lead the way for women, for women of color, and for anyone who’s ever felt, as Butler did in school, like an outsider,” places “women” and “women of color” in separate groups, thus hierarchizing whiteness as the default position for womanhood.

Parham, Marisa. “Saying “Yes”: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s “Kindred”“ Callaloo 32.4 (2009): 1315-331. Project Muse. Johns Hopkins University Press, Dec. 2009. Web.

Parham’s conceptualization of bodies in Butler’s novel “Kindred” provides yet another reading of the ways in which Butler maps cultural and racial anxieties onto the physical bodies of her protagonists; although Parham’s conception of Butler’s bodies revolves primarily around the consideration of Dana’s body as a text in and of itself. Parham explores the ways in which Butler emphasizes “reading” bodies, and of bodies being read as powerful or powerless (this emphasis is intended to be interpreted as a clear corollary to the ways in which bodies are read as raced or gendered or sexed by a dominant society intent on maintaining an oppressive cultural norm). By engaging with a popular conception of Butler’s work as being transfixed by and preoccupied with the issue of the body and its significance in a racialized world, Parham successfully crafts a narrative of Butler’s Black Feminist thought that creates Butler’s bodies as sites for terror and trauma as well as resolution, and gives credence to the idea of words as unifying and uplifting tools to be used and read by bodies — even as they themselves are used and read by those around them.

Peterson, Latoya. “Wild Seed [Octavia Butler Book Club].” Racialicious. Racialicious, 7 July 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2013.

The value of this source lies primarily in the fact that it provides an open forum for a number of interested voices to weigh in on different aspects of Butler’s writing; though there is a moderator and a single person initiates the discussion, the majority of thoughts and opinions raised in the comments section critically engage with Butler’s treatment of romantic relationships in “Wild Seed” and what implications said treatment has for the Black women reading her work and discussing it with one another. The true importance of a literary format that privileges discussion and a call-and-response model of thought sharing over a singular monologue, proven by citing other academic sources, cannot be emphasized enough. The readers/commenters on Racialicious (which bills itself as a site specifically focused on “the intersection of race and pop culture”) are themselves invested in a response to Butler’s work that is not academic so much as it is personal — “what is this author saying about race and sexuality and relationships, and how does it apply to me?” As a result, much of the ensuing discussion revolves around the main character’s romantic relationship, and the ways in which the readers perceive it as unhealthy and, at times, coercive. That many of them disapprove of the ways in which the romance itself is depicted does not mean that they are negating Butler’s point of view or purpose in writing the novel, only that they are committed to an engaged and continuing model of discussion that allows for an evolving pool of accessible Black feminist thought.

Robertson, Benjamin. “”Some Matching Strangeness”: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler’s “Kindred”“ Science Fiction Studies 37.3 (2010): 362-81.JSTOR. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Robertson’s treatment of the ways in which political difference a (as well as racialized and gendered dynamics) are mapped onto the physical bodies of Butler’s characters does a lot of building on other works referenced in this bibliography, specifically the conceptualization of bodies as othering and othered forces that Butler uses to exemplify class, racial, and gendered difference even in alien places and times. Robertson spends much of the first half of his critique focusing on and refuting another scholar’s interpretation of Butler’s works, then turns his attention to the manifold ways in which Butler interweaves United States history with science fiction. His main argument revolves around the idea that characters’ bodies physically represent the ties between historical context and fantastical alternative realities, thus embodying the ties between larger-scale geopolitical dynamics and the microcosms of United States racial politics and historical micro and macro-aggressions against marginalized groups.

Salvaggio, Ruth. “Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine.” Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 78-81. JSTOR. Web. 13 Dec. 2013.

Salvaggio’s critique is primarily concerned with the construction of Octavia Butler’s heroines as Black women who navigate their way through fantastical and treacherous terrains that retain their familiarity by recreating issues of sexism and racism. Salvaggio traces the creation of Butler’s Black female main characters by creating a chronological history of her works and observing the various changes each character undergoes before arriving at what Salvaggio believes to be the crescendo of Black heroine representation in “Wild Seed“‘s Anyanwu. By situating Butler as a pioneer in the creation of Black female characters that carry Butler’s science fiction novels in their entirety, Salvaggio is reinforcing Butler’s connection to the idea of the Black Feminist as a pioneer of representation. By emphasizing Butler’s commitment to the female heroine who is complex and layered in her representation (someone who makes difficult and often wrong choices, but who ultimately claims the ability to choose and makes that the central point of her characterization) Salvaggio is attempting to link Butler to a line of other Black feminists, and to situate her work within a larger consciousness that views the dearth of representation of Black female characters (and writers) as a tragedy that can be remedied by increased participation in the genre.

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