Time Lapse and Time Capsules: The Chronopolitics of Octavia E. Butler’s Fiction

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Notes

¹ The selection team for the material was headed by Carl Sagan. Samaras notes the “Family of Man” type representation—claiming universality—settled on for the capsules.

² See Terry (2013) for a fuller version of my engagement with Gilroy.

³ At one point Gilroy poses the “idea of diaspora” as an “eruption of space into the linear temporal order of modern black politics which enforces the obligation that space and time must be considered relationally in their interarticulation with racialised being” (198). See Goyal on Gilroy’s tendency to highlight the slave trade and “slavery as the primary historical crucible for modern blackness” (vi). See also Hanchard on the African diaspora, modernity, and the imposed disparity and disjuncture of racialized time.

⁴ Gilroy explains, “It is being suggested that the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marked out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later” (221).

⁵ See Terry (2016) for a fuller version of my engagement with Eshun.

⁶ Hanchard writes, “unequal relationships between dominant and subordinate groups produce unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources, power, and knowledge […] racial time has operated as a structural effect upon the politics of racial difference” (253). See also Fabian’s foundational work on how modern time, and temporal distance, underpins the anthropological notion of otherness, wherein different populations are seen as belonging to different times.

⁷ Eshun’s call can be situated alongside those of other thinkers who see Afrofuturism as a critical approach rather than a utopian vision; Mark Bould, rather than “merely celebrating Afrofuturism as resistance,” holds work under this label to account for not often enough questioning capitalism and aiming for “a transformation” (182).

⁸ Wittenberg also turns to a category of “non-science-fictional narrative experiments that might be called time travel either in their specific confrontation with the significance of temporal ordering or in their experimental construction of narrative viewpoint” (210).

⁹ The foundational Afrofuturist film The Last Angel of History (1995) features a time hopping, excavating “data thief” who resonates with Butler’s time rogue.

¹⁰ This alternative modality resonates with geological “deep time,” a temporal scale that has been influential in ecocritical thought.

¹¹ Lauren comments, “My ‘talent,’ going back to the parable of the talents, is Earthseed. And although I haven’t buried it in the ground, I have buried it here in these coastal mountains, where it can grow at about the same speed as our redwood trees” (Talents 25).

¹² Bankole summarizes, “God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways” (Talents 48). See Phillips on the dialectical thinking that underlies this sense of change.

¹³ See Guha-Majumdar for an engaging discussion of determinism and hope, pessimism and optimism, in Kindred via Ernst Bloch.

¹⁴ In the language of financial speculation on the future, she says “Kevin, let’s take out some insurance. … Let’s see what we can do to keep him from growing into a red-haired version of his father” (81). Kevin’s reply, “You’re gambling. Hell, you’re gambling against History” highlights the high stakes but also hints at Dana as potentially a trickster-like time rogue (83).

¹⁵ Dana updates her bag, adding items such as a toothbrush and toothpaste, a knife, a history book, a map (see Kindred 45, 49, and 114–15).

¹⁶ In both Parable novels, Earthseed verses feature at the start of each chapter and there is, at the very end of each text, the inclusion of biblical passages that tell the respective parables of the sower and the talents.