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Pleasure activist, black feminist, and author adrienne maree brown has utilized the philosophical underpinnings of The Parable of the Sower to write Emergent Strategy, a social justice guidebook to shape change. Jemisin, and Sheree Renée Thomas, continue to build on Butler’s Afrofuturist traditions. Contemporary scholars and award-winning writers, such as Nisi Shawl, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. As one of the preeminent authors of Afrofuturism, her works have carried an enduring literary legacy that continues to this day.

#127 in the Celebrate People’s History Poster Series.īutler’s literary works created distinct speculative spaces which explored re-imaginings of liberation, equity and access. Amidst crisis, Lauren is able to lead a group to Northern California to build the mutual aid collective Earthseed. Lauren must survive in a world marked by climate change, socioeconomic disparities, and migration, all while managing her hyper-empathy syndrome. With the collapse of her gated community that protected her from the outside world, Lauren is forced to embark on a dangerous journey on the abandoned Los Angeles freeway. This condition causes Lauren to bodily experience the mental and physical hurt of others in a post-apocalyptic setting. The protagonist in the Parable of the Sower, Lauren, suffers from hyper-empathy syndrome. īutler’s work explores abilities from various vantage points, blending science fiction and black radical traditions. As she nurtured her ‘positive obsessions’, her disabilities were also compounded by classist and racialized in access to healthcare. In her adulthood she became a diligent researcher, fusing historical scholarship with her radical imagination in her literary works.

As a form of resistance, she began to create richly speculative narratives as a way to reimagine race, disability, class and gender. Her school teachers believed that Octavia was ‘lazy and did not try hard enough.’ From these childhood experiences, Butler reframed the narrative of disability by believing herself to be a genius and highly capable. Her fiction centred the narratives of black protagonists with disabilities as she herself confronted racial, class, gender and ability-based discrimination.īutler was undiagnosed with dyslexia as a child, which negatively impacted her earliest experiences of writing. As the first science fiction author to receive the MacArthur Genius award, Butler changed and shaped the genre of science fiction through her Afrofuturist works. Her novel, The Parable of the Sower (1993) reached the New York Times Best Seller’s List on 3rd September, almost three decades after it was first published. Butler’s 1988 commonplace book, became a prophecy that materialized in 2020.

I write best-selling novels.” This incantation penned within Octavia E. The first contribution comes from PhD student Katie Heffner: “So be it, see to it!”: The Legacies of Octavia E.

#OCTAVIA E BUTLER POSTER SERIES#

Continuing our ongoing blog series celebrating diversity, we asked staff and students in the School of History for reflections on key individuals, groups, events and episodes related to the history of disability. 18th November – 18th December 2020 is Disability History Month.

Octavia e butler poster