Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
2,402
result(s) for
"Octavia Butler"
Sort by:
Octavia E. Butler
\"Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.\" -- Publisher's description.
BOOK
Folklore and the Fetish
On Monday, March 21, 2022, I sat down with Anand Prahlad (University of Missouri Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus) to have a conversation via Zoom. Topics discussed included everything from cryptocurrency to pedagogy. The portions of the interview included here offer insight into Dr. Prahlad’s legacy as an educator and scholar. Questions were provided to Professor Prahlad in advance, so he uses past tense occasionally to denote a question that he previously contemplated). The text has been edited for length and clarity.
Journal Article
God is change : religious practices and ideologies in the works of Octavia Butler
Throughout her work, Octavia E.Butler explored, critiqued, and created religious ideology.Her prescient thoughts on the synergy between politics and religion in America are evident in her 1993 dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower , and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents.
eBook
For My Daughter Kakuya: Imagining Children at the End(s) of the World
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed individual and institutional anxieties about the apocalypse. Pastors and activists alike turned to the depiction of the apocalypse in popular media to describe the urgency of decisive action. Implicitly, these depictions offer a curious method for engaging and imagining children. Assata Shakur writes compelling poetry in her autobiography about her hopes for the world. In one poem, entitled For My Daughter Kakuya, I argue that Shakur engages in Afrofuturist speculative fiction as she envisions a future world for her daughter. This paper explores how writers living through these times themselves imagine Black children at the end of the world. What would happen if we took seriously the notion that the “end of the world” is always at hand for Black people? This article explores the stomach-turning warning that Jesus offers in Mark 13:14–19 regarding those who are “pregnant and nursing in those days”. Using a reproductive justice lens, this paper explores the eternal challenge of imagining and stewarding a future in which Black children are safe and thriving. It also explores the limits and possibilities of partnering with radical Black faith traditions to this end.
Journal Article
For a Psychoanalysis of the Flesh
This essay takes the notion of “flesh” as the point of departure for exploring the viability and contemporary relevance of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “ontological psychoanalysis”. Primary interlocutors will be Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Hortense Spillers’s essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”.
Journal Article
Reproductive Rights and Ecofeminism
The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs decision in June 2022 came as a shock. Yet, upon reflection, the decision simply reinforced what history has shown: women’s rights and opportunities have always been subject to controls, fluctuations, and specious rationales. Dobbs is one in a long line of legal edicts in the U.S. and elsewhere that either allow or curtail and control female agency, including reproductive agency. The decision’s devastating consequences for U.S. women’s reproductive lives are damaging enough, but they are only part of the story. In addition to its hobbling effects on reproductive rights and justice, the Dobbs decision goes hand in hand with the underlying causes of today’s unparalleled environmental emergency. This article argues, through ecofeminist theory and feminist and Native American climate fiction, that Dobbs is a catalyst for understanding the role of patriarchy—as a particularly insidious form of androcentrism—in the destruction of our planet. Evidence is mounting to support claims made by ecofeminists since the 1970s: patriarchy and resulting masculinist values have been foundational to the extractive and exploitative attitudes and practices regarding marginalized peoples, colonized lands, and racialized entitlements to natural resources that have endangered the earth’s biosystems.
Journal Article
Feminismos especulativos \panamefricanos\: alegorías afrofuturistas de regeneración para mundos posibles en Octavia Butler y Lu Ain-Zaila
En este ensayo contrasto el potencial creativo y político de dos narradoras afrofuturistas: la estadounidense Octavia Butler y la brasileña Lu Ain-Zaila. Aunque escriben en tiempos y geografías diferentes, sus ficciones confluyen en la capacidad que adquieren sus personajes femeninas afrodescendientes para corregir el mundo que conocemos. Sugiero que sus feminismos especulativos \"panamefricanos\" (Lélia Gonzalez) crean alegorías afrofuturistas de \"regeneración\" (Donna Haraway) en la medida que sus propuestas estéticas surgen de los bordes de la interseccionalidad americana y de una modernidad gestada en las entrañas del \"Atlántico negro\" (Paul Gilroy). ¿Cómo se figura literariamente la transformación empoderadora de sus personajes afrofuturistas? ¿En qué consisten sus capacidades para regenerar el mundo e imaginar otras formas de relacionamiento? Leo los cuentos \"The Book of Martha\" (1995) de Octavia Butler y \"Criancas vermelhas (2018) de Lu Ain-Zaila para analizar las maneras en que imaginan la transformación de Martha y Minkha, sus respectivas protagonistas, y los poderes que reciben para cambiar el mundo.
Journal Article
‘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.
Journal Article
Body Horror in Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark
African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns.
Journal Article
Becoming Other, Becoming More
This article examines how continuity is dealt with in fictional feminist texts that depict gender or sexuate transition, via surgical intervention or transmogrification, in terms of naming and pronoun use, self-image, and perceived image. The texts here examined—literary and filmic works by cis artists Angela Carter, Sally Potter, and Octavia Butler, principally—all pastiche the familiar narratological mode of transsexual autobiography, aping the convention of internal focalization, though each elides the wrong-body formula that frequently accompanies such narratives to justify access to medical treatment and care. I situate each alongside scholarly engagements with transsexual embodiment, surgery, and lived experience, with particular focus on flesh as that which both contains and determines gendered and sexed readings, to ground these fictive accounts of becoming.
Journal Article