If You Will Learn

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993).

2 Matthew 13:13 (New International Version).

3 Sandra Govan, “The Parable of the Sower as Rendered by Octavia Butler: Lessons for Our Changing Times,” Femspec 4, no. 2 (2003): 239–58.

4 Octavia E. Butler and N.K. Jemisin, Parable of the Sower, Reissued (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019), 279.

5 Ibid., 179.

6 Ibid., 295.

7 Michele T. Berger, review of Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler, The Black Scholar 24, no. 4 (1994): 53.

8 Octavia E. Butler, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Essence, May 2000, 165.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., 264

11 Toshi Reagon, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (opera), Created by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon, Co-directed by Eric Ting and Signe V. Harriday, based on the book by Octavia E. Butler, Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, May 5, 2023.

12 Ibid.

13 Benjamin Carson, “Planting the Seeds of Anarchy: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” Fifth Estate Magazine, Fall 2006, 23.

14 Savannah Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 12.

15 Ibid.

16 Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown, Octavia’s Parables (podcast), Episodes 1–37, Produced by Kat Aaron, 2020, https://www.readingoctavia.com/.

17 adrienne maree brown, “The Body and The Parable Opera,” ARTS.BLACK, July 2, 2018.

18 Reagon, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (opera).

19 Ibid.

20 Kofi Agawu, The African Imagination in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 14.

21 Reagon, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (opera).

22 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Victoria Netanus Grubbs

Victoria Netanus Grubbs is a Black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator. She is a Black Studies Collaboratory Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research on popular music studies demonstrates how shared investments in the sensory experience of blackness bring forth a collective interpreting body that refutes both the possibility of and the desire for the individual human subject.

Amelia Simone Herbert

Amelia Simone Herbert is a Black feminist educator and anthropologist of education. She is assistant professor of education and urban studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She researches and teaches on the roles that education plays in the construction and subversion of racialized inequality in global perspective. She has a particular concern with the politics of black aspiration in unequal urban schooling landscapes in South Africa and the United States.