Emergent Counter-Memories in the Field of Octavia E. Butler Studies

This introduction contextualizes the articles in this second special issue of Women’s Studies on Octavia E. Butler. What follows also gives a brief chronological account of the philosophical moment out of which this current scholarship on Octavia E. Butler emerges. We assert that scholarship on Butler is widespread and multivalent. It comes from both within the academy and out of communities of readers, practitioners, independent scholars, artists, laypeople, radical farmers, filmmakers, and more (Penniman). Scholarship on Octavia E. Butler will likely be categorized by significant time periods, beginning in the 1970s when she first began publishing up to her death in 2006, followed by February 2006 to November 2013 when her literary archives became available for research, and November 2013 to mid-2015 as a period of reemergence of her individual popularity and interest in Black futurist thought more broadly (Benjamin 103). Many of these volumes’ authors have been among the first to publish, present, and create art, curriculum, and other works inspired by contact with Butler’s archives whether through first-person research, viewing digitized images from the collection, or encountering other scholars with first-person research.

Figure 1. 1988 Nassau Bahamas, Essence Writers’ Retreat. This item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, OEB 7279. Note that this image was featured prominently in the exhibition; however, the names of these Black women writers were not listed in the exhibition.

Seated (from left) Dr. Julianne Malveaux, Betty Winston Baye, Stephanie Stokes Oliver, Sonia Sanchez, Thulani Davis, Ntozake Shange, Valerie Wilson Wesley, Bebe Moore Campbell. Second row, from left Toni Cade Bambara, Elsie Washington, Barbara Smith, Marlene NorbeSe Philip, Bonnie Allen, Sherley Anne Williams, Cheryll Y. Greene, Ayesha Grice, Phyl Garland, Ivy Young, Elaine Brown. Last row, from left Susan L. Taylor, Lena G. Sherrod, Renita Weems, Jean Wiley, Audrey Edwards, Jill Nelson, Vertamae Grosvenor, Octavia Butler, & Lucille Clifton.

Our collaboration comes out of parallel work that often converges in the Butler archive and in community with other members of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network (@Oeblegacy). Founded in 2011, Oeblegacy is a virtual and physical community of scholars, activists, artists, culture workers, and fans inspired by Butler’s work, shaped by and shaping Butler’s legacy. Ayana is Oeblegacy’s founder and Moya is its Digital Alchemist. Each conference, publication, interview, or gathering, whether at Princeton University; University of California, San Diego; or on Twitter, people are engaged in learning more or being in conversation about Octavia E. Butler’s life and work. Our membership is diverse, active, activist, from every gender expression, age, class, ability, and cultural identity around the globe.

Elsewhere, we used the term palimpsestuous memorialization to describe the ways Butler’s writings were extracted, reconstituted, and fictionalized from her personal histories and histories at large while being inextricably linked to the geopolitical landscapes and locations of southern California, Los Angeles, and Pasadena (Bailey and Jamieson vi). adrienne maree brown has used the term “emergent strategy” to tease out Butler’s praxis throughout her published works (1). Likewise, we seek to witness and reveal patterns that emerge in her work and the strategies people use for survival and self-actualization. We continue to ask what strategies emerge from Butler’s published work, her archives, and the field as a whole. We continue to document, commemorate, conjure, imagine, investigate, instigate toward a more wholistic approach to learning in community that evolves and is not static. What we understand today can be expanded, corrected, and re-membered in a different way at another point in time, like the palimpsest’s layers of memory.

Archival research is the process of engaging with a series of personal objects in an intimate way by reconstructing the past, getting familiar with the private individual, uncovering what lies beneath the public persona, and so much more. Octavia E. Butler was a notoriously private individual who referred to herself as a hermit while also generously giving interviews, advice, and mentoring other writers (Photographed with her peers in Figure 1). The field of Octavia E. Butler’s Studies that we have articulated as an extant interdisciplinary field is always in relation to the institution that houses Butler’s collection of manuscripts while Butler scholars of all types remain in relationship with one another.

The current scholarship is facilitated by the rupture of Butler’s sudden death in 2006 when readers and scholars were eagerly awaiting Parable of the Trickster—a novel that would never be finished. As other womanist theorists have proposed, rupture is a necessary part of transformation (Anzaldúa and Keating 49). In the Parables duology, Change is an archetypal and inevitable force that Butler describes as pliable: Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay (Sower 25). This historical moment of uncertainty, natural disasters, political upheaval in the United States and elsewhere are another set of ruptures requiring and causing change.

Octavia E. Butler’s papers are not at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Many are surprised to learn that her papers are archived at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The unlikely combination of the literary legacy of Butler—a working-class writer whose widowed mother worked as a domestic—being housed at a prestigious and exclusive research institution has sparked interest and measured skepticism from all corners (Radical Reproduction 13). To be sure, Butler is the first notable Black woman science fiction writer to have papers in the archive in San Marino, California, a former notorious sundown town (Marez 1). While San Marino as an ultra-wealthy suburb of Los Angeles and the institution of the Huntington are not the same, they coexist and co-constitute one another.

The Huntington itself has been the subject of scrutiny after PhD candidate and Butler scholar Cecilia Caballero published a blog revealing the painful experiences that many people of color have while working in the research library or visiting the grounds, which she titled, “Mothering While Brown in White Spaces, or, When I Took My Son to Octavia Butler’s Exhibit” (144–47). Her account mirrors the larger trend of control, surveillance, suppression, and policing to which Black, Brown, and women’s bodies are often subjected. Simply put, law enforcement being called when people of color are just existing (having a cook-out, being in their own homes, playing in the park, sleeping, walking home), sometimes resulting in their physical or mortal harm is being exposed via social media, upending the veneer of fairness and justice (Benjamin 103). Many people from marginalized communities have trauma fatigue, regardless of education level or access to elite institutions that were not originally designed for their inclusion (Schalk 81).

It is our belief that Butler knew her audiences (and by extension her potential archival researchers) were not limited to science fiction readers, but also women and feminists, Black people across the diaspora, queer folks, and others (Govan and Butler 14). In her private journals, she wrote her desire to use whatever influence she had earned to create inclusive spaces for poor people, and poor Black kids, to send them to Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop and presumably to do research in her papers, which came out of her personal experiences of Jim Crow California, being excluded, shunned, ridiculed, harassed by law enforcement, and being the poor, ugly “out-kid” (Butler et al. 68). Her presence in the field of speculative fiction is an act of resistance as was her refusal to give up her lifelong desire to become a writer. She did so much more than win the MacArthur “Genius” grant.

“The normal processes of education about official national history, and the heroic monuments and museums that are built to memorialize celebrated events, are actually a form of amnesia and deadening, pushing away the real suffering and violence experienced in the past and covering it over with national myths” (Watkins and Shulman 238). Butler’s work has always been a form of counter-memory and counter-memorial that provides textual evidence that things have not gotten better enough. Triumphant narratives that do not acknowledge the historical and ongoing power disparities would have ignored the incident Caballero and her son experienced and pointed to one or two token cases of inclusion—or indeed Butler’s choice to bequeath her papers at the Huntington—as a sign of colorblind, post-Obama era, post-racial reality that simply does not exist. We hope these volumes help to further Butler’s mission of making space for marginalized people and providing strategies for surviving in hostile environments.

Parables of the past, present, and future

This second volume of the special issue comes out of collective spaces and public humanities projects that invite readers and intellectuals of all types to share their ways for reading Butler’s work and archives. Many of the emergent themes in the articles contained in this issue act as archetypal story patterns that reflect the interdisciplinary field of Octavia E. Butler Studies. The articles include artistic and literary explorations by artist Olaronke Akinmowo, Jennifer Terry, Gerry Canavan, and Natalie Russell, the curator who cataloged Butler’s papers at the Huntington Library. Each entry theorizes about Butler’s methods, pedagogy, praxes, with some implications for future of the field itself.

First, Natalie Russell notes in “Meeting Octavia E. Butler in Her Papers” that Butler spoke at a women’s studies seminar in 1989 at The Huntington. That women’s studies seminar started the chain of events that would lead to Butler agreeing to bequeath her papers to the institution for scholars to access in the future. In “Meeting Octavia” Russell outlines the detailed, meticulous, and indeed tedious process of cataloging the large and complicated lifetime of work left behind after Butler’s sudden death in 2006. Russell’s generous recollections of her more than three-year process of cataloging the collection will be of interest to librarians, archivists, and scholars just beginning their research in the Butler papers. Russell also outlines the process of winnowing down those thousands of objects into about 100 for the “Telling My Stories” exhibition in 2017.

The exhibition at the Huntington Library opened April 8, 2017 and concluded August 7, 2017. Like the “Octavia E. Butler Studies Conference” on June 23, 2017, the exhibition coincided with what would have been Butler’s 70th birthday. By all accounts the exhibit was a success.

Caballero’s account of her visit to the exhibit was published on August 23, 2017 and garnered over 50,000 views in a short period of time.

The Butler exhibition was taken down from the West Hall of the Library Exhibition Gallery to make way for the next temporary installation, and only one item related to Butler’s archive remains on display at the time of this writing. Ironically, the Main Exhibition Gallery, which houses a fraction of the permanent collections on a rotating basis, only has materials up to the 1950s. Butler’s single page from a typewritten Parable of the Sower draft and a photograph are in a small room on the opposite end of the building where the exhibit had been in a room that Huntington employees call the “Trustees Room” or Library Orientation Room, which features information on scholars doing research, preservation of literary collections, and a few of the books that have been published by researchers based on their Huntington research. In order to find this out of the way place, one has to ask or know where it is to begin with.

Next, Jennifer Terry begins with a query: “What is learnt when questions of temporality, of relations with the past, and of forms of anticipating the future are pressed in analysis of narrative fiction?” in “Time Lapse and Time Capsules: The Chronopolitics of Octavia E. Butler’s Fiction.” Terry examines Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Kindred and the ways these novels complicate grand narratives. In this construction, the text itself is the time machine and the vehicle for exploration:

Unfolding the retrospective and anticipatory as contested, active fields; denaturalizing the (re)production of uneven futures; complicating grand narratives and temporal logics of progress; exploring temporalities of the subordinated, including staging rupture, discontinuity, time discrepancy, entrapment, and foreclosure: Octavia E. Butler’s engagement with time and movement in time stands as political, and as self-reflexively revealing the politics of time, chronopolitics if you will, to her readers.

Terry theorizes that the marginalized instead stake claims to the temporal, creating “an impression of plurality and of temporal reach, at the same time exposing forms of discontinuity and disagreement, and modeling how we time travel in narrative.”

Olaronke Akinmowo’s collages punctuate a list of twelve lessons she learned from reading Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. As with Terry’s assessment, Butler centralizes those who take risks and defy the marginalization they face to meet history on their own terms. Akinmowo uses her adept curating skills to offer pragmatic advice couched in Butler’s cautionary tale such as: Practice pleasure; be prepared; manage your emotions; make it plain; trust your intuition; respect nature; build community; and other lessons. Akinmowo urges readers to use our time and other resources wisely. Echoing other scholars, Akinmowo pays attention to climate change and xenophobia as dangerous to our collective wellbeing: “It’s also important to remember that we are a reflection of nature, interdependent, we are earth, and the earth is us. We are as expansive as the airy sky, as malleable as water, as hot and passionate as water, as fertile as the earth, capable of growth for all time. The fact is we are nothing without this planet” (see also Streeby, Imagining the Future of Climate Change).

Finally, Gerry Canavan revisits the unfinished fragments of the Parable of the Trickster. He writes, “However unintended, Butler has anticipated us all here: in giving us the fragmentary, multidirectional story of a flock that does not quite know what to do with itself once its prophet is gone, she has surely foretold our own story as Butler scholars post-2006.” He not only reveals Butler’s thoughts on toxic masculinity (the current topic of conversation via the #metoo movement), but also how deeply meaningful the Parables books are. He notes that while new people are discovering the books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents feel even more relevant now than when they were written 20 years ago, “after the election of Donald Trump has unhappily proved [Butler’s Parables] righter than we ever would have dreamed.” He shares our collective hope that Butler’s archives and unpublished work should be more widely available to all kinds of readers beyond the academy: “In whatever form is practical, readable, and economically viable, I hope non-scholars are someday allowed to see for themselves these tantalizing glimmers of what Trickster might have been.”

This two-part special issue was originally commissioned following the “Octavia E. Butler Studies: Convergence of an Expanding Field” conference at the Huntington Library on June 23, 2017, the day after what would have been Butler’s 70th birthday. We would like to thank Cassandra Jones, Shelley Streeby, Dagmar Van Engen, Curtis Marez, Angela Rovak, Connie Samaras, Natalie Russell, Olaronke Akinmowo, Jennifer Terry, and Gerry Canavan for their dynamic contributions to this project. We would also like to thank The Huntington Library and Octavia E. Butler’s estate for their ongoing generosity, encouragement, and support. Finally, we extend our gratitude to members of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network for their ongoing work to highlight Butler’s legacy.