This forum focuses on the legacy of science fiction novelist Octavia Butler as a sociopolitical prophet, theological innovator and feminist theorizer. Butler (1947-2006) is the author of the Patternist, the Xenogenesis, and the Parable series, as well as standalone novels Kindred and Fledgling, and a host of short stories and published essays.
Reading Butler’s fictional works against contemporary social, ecological, and geopolitical crises, her prescient ability to imagine and communicate a dystopic near-future from her writing desk in the 1980s and 1990s is uniquely prodigious. As a Black American woman and as a person dedicated to writing worlds that reflected American racial, gender, economic, and cultural systems of inequality, Butler facilitated texts that speak to contemporary global patterns of oppression, exploitation, colonialization, revolution, and resistance. In the Parable series in particular, Butler’s protagonists must navigate ecological catastrophe, the collapse of public resource system, and political polarization that quickly evolves into a militarized theocratic state (complete with a presidential candidate that promises to “make America great again”).
The contributors to this symposium, Aparajita Nanda, Ebony Gibson, CiAuna Heard, and Michael McCormack, examine the political, theological, and sociological contribution of Butler’s work to understanding contemporary inequalities in the United States. In a response to religious extremism and dogmatic rigidity, Butler’s protagonists embrace a polytheistic, community-oriented faith practice. Ebony Gibson’s essay focuses on African Spiritual traditions in Earthseed, noting how this embrace expands theological conceptions of change, time, death, and life. Aparajita Nanda explores how religious practices from the global south are reflected in the Earthseed tradition; in particular how Hinduism and Earthseed offer ways of viewing a world saturated with socio-political and cultural discrimination, as well as framing alternative visions for human survival. The following essay by CiAuna Heard expands on the composite, grassroots nature of the Earthseed religion, arguing that its theology and practice is a manifestation of Ecowomanism as a critical, spiritual, activist framework for conceptualizing and organizing against systemic oppression. Finally, Michael McCormack’s piece considers the major sociopolitical crises in the Parables series as analogous to contemporary crises in education, labor, and racism in America. Just as the Kindred adaptation on Hulu has experienced wild success, with echoes to the racial police state of contemporary America, so too may an adaptation of the Parable series allow for new ways to think about political, economic, and environmental crises plaguing America today.
