Mapping Desire: Octavia E. Butler Studies as Palimpsest and Praxis

The Octavia E. Butler Studies Conference was held on June 23, 2017 at the Huntington Library, one day after what would have been Octavia E. Butler’s 70th birthday. Founded in 2011, The Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network grew out of my doctoral research, the need to be in community around that research, and the geohistorical explorations of Pasadena and surrounding southern California landscapes that surface in Butler’s fiction. Since 2011, the community organization has endeavored to highlight the ongoing work related to and inspired by Octavia E. Butler. The Octavia E. Butler Studies conference was the first of its kind hailing Butler’s life and work as the nexus of an extant expanding and evolving interdisciplinary field of study. Our ongoing conversations examine the expansive ways Butler’s life, writing, research, and methodologies foster deeper understanding of the past, present, and possible futures. The essays contained in this issue are a fraction of the Butler scholarship that is done around the world. Each of the contributing scholars distinguish themselves with the distinction of significant time spent in the Butler archives. Of the 8,000-plus individually cataloged items, and more than 350 boxes of material, these articles begin to unfold Butler’s four-decade career, which ended upon her sudden death at age 58.

The fields of study contained herein are only a fraction of the possible topics of exploration that Butler touched on in her work. Neuroscience, etymology, geology, anthropology, medicine, education, political science, public policy, history, and nearly every natural and social science are in dialogue in her work. The articles are arranged more or less chronologically according to publication dates of the work Butler published, although Butler’s archival papers in practice are a palimpsest of memory, history, resistance, and longing. It is nearly impossible to discuss one theme or concept without looking to adjacent notes, journals, clippings, marginalia, ephemera, and journals that often spread across decades. In “Memory and Resistance: Doro’s Empire, Mary’s Rebellion, and Anyanwu as Lieu de Mémoire in Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind and Wild Seed,” Cassandra Jones draws on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire to examine the role of memory in moments of liberation and their potential intervention in the development of new cultural structures. Just as books from Octavia E. Butler’s earliest published series of Patternist novels, Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, feature Anyanwu. This character, according to Jones, functions as a lieu de mémoire that defies historical amnesia, acting as a voice of resistance to colonial forces in a post-colonial context. She represents both a connection to the past and the potential for liberation from these structures of domination at a critical moment in the creation of a new governing system. Jones’s work also leads into Butler’s archive having the possibilities for liberation in resistance to policies and circumstances that threatened the public good.

The public library was a special location for Butler throughout her life as a repository for memory and symbol for what was a well-informed, prosperous, and open populous. By the time Butler passed away, her home contained hundreds of books stacked from floor to ceiling. She used specialized encyclopedias, dictionaries, and field-specific guides to help her in her work. Before she could afford to amass a huge personal library, public libraries were her places of research and work as Shelley Streeby discusses in “Radical Reproduction: Octavia E. Butler’s HistoFuturist Archiving as Speculative Theory.” Streeby locates Butler’s writing and life as part of the Black Radical Tradition recounting the archival evidence that outlines Butler as a self-described Histofuturist in the process of “archiving, constellating, and annotating.” Before the Internet, Google, research databases, and the like, Butler used the card catalogs, clipping newspapers and listening to National Public Radio to “fill the well” and map the desire to write above all else. Streeby highlights the crucial vitality of access to libraries, public policy, and efforts to shape Butler’s legacy into the future.

In “Metamorphosis, Transition, and Insect Biology in the Octavia E. Butler Archive” Dagmar Van Engen turns to Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy, which was published in the 1980s. This article investigates how Butler researched and reimagined insect biology—in particular, metamorphosis—in order to build an alien universe in which gender transition is the norm rather than the exception. In Xenogenesis, all aliens are genderless during childhood, but acquire gender during metamorphosis in puberty. Van Engen argues that the third book of the trilogy, Imago, uses invertebrate life to centralize transgender—particularly nonbinary transgender—characters at the heart of its hybrid nature-cultural world.

Finally, Curtis Marez contextualizes Butler’s writing after the Chicanx movement as a kind of radical reproduction in resistance to anti-Black and anti-Mexican sentiments in California as they appear in the Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Together with Streeby’s work, Marez points to Butler’s radical consciousness and recognition of solidarity and symbiosis represented in the cautionary future-present novels. Taken together, with Angela Rovak’s review of Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, these essays speculate about Butler’s embodied awareness of the precarity of marginalized individuals in culture and indeed, marginalized researchers occupy space that was never meant to be shared or entered at its original inception. As Van Engen reiterates, “Butler’s notes express a determination to learn and make something new and useful out of the troubling histories” of the past toward a critical hope for equity and inclusion.

Note that wherever possible, authors have left Butler’s notes, spelling, and emphasis (often written in all capital letters) intact, indicating emphasis in the original. OEB is the abbreviation used as a call number prefix for the Octavia E. Butler Collection of literary manuscripts throughout.