Seeding a Black Feminist Future on the Horizon of a Third Reconstruction: The Abolitionist Politics of Self-Care in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

ABSTRACT

Entering the discussion of the current political climate as a possible “Third Reconstruction,” this article reads Octavia E. Butler’s recent New York Times bestselling novel, Parable of the Sower, to re-center the fugitive politics that brought about the first Reconstruction in the long struggle for Black liberation and engender what I am calling an abolitionist politics of self-care. Butler’s main character, Lauren Oya Olamina, operates as literary archive that brings together an initial canon of Black feminist intellectual visionaries, each of whom contributed to the long project of Reconstruction, and provides tangible practices for abolition democracy steeped in an attentiveness to interdependence and sustainability, all ecological, emotional, and political.

KEYWORDS:

• Abolition democracy
• Harriet Tubman
• Ella Baker
• Claudia Jones
• Melina Abdullah

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge the many iterations that precede this piece and the people and places that made it possible. I first started writing this piece when I taught Butler’s Parable of the Sower in a junior/senior political science seminar titled “Black Feminist Political Thought Revisited” in the spring semester at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) in Geneva, New York, as a visiting assistant professor for the 2018–2019 academic year. I want to thank all my students in that course and my HWS colleagues, particularly Jodi Dean, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Kevin Dunn, Justin Rose, and J. Ricky Price for their pedagogical, financial, and personal support. That fall I presented the first formulation at the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC (APSA) while serving as the visiting assistant professor of political theory at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois (Augie). I would be remiss if I did not thank my colleagues - Xiaowen Zhang, David M. Dehnel, Mariano J. Magalhães, and Maruice Mangum - and students there for their interest, constructive criticism, and enthusiasm for my teaching of abolition during the 2019-2020 academic year. I want to thank my APSA co-panelists for their comradeship and critical feedback - Althea Rani Sircar, Sean Parson, and Jasmine K. Seydullah. In the spring, I presented the second adaptation of this essay at the National Conference of Black Political Scientists in Atlanta, Georgia (NCOBPS). Though not all the panelists were able to attend due to the unfolding of the COVID-19 crisis, I want to specifically thank Zahra Ahmed for chairing, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard for coordinating, and Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd for virtually joining in to give rich and powerful suggestions that I certainly aimed to incorporate in this most recent edition. At my current institution, I want to thank Shiela Harmon Martin, Amanda Huron, Guy Shroyer, and Monique A. Gamble for their enthusiasm for this project. Many thanks to Rudy V. Busto at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I first read Butler’s Parable of the Sower in Busto’s race and religion seminar, and for that I will always be grateful. Finally, I want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their patient and deliberate considerations of not only my contribution but all the pieces in this timely and necessary issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The academic interest in Butler’s papers at Huntington includes Dr. Ayana A.H. Jamieson, who founded the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network (OEBLegacy; http://octaviabutlerlegacy.com/) in 2011. Jamieson and Moya Bailey, Digital Alchemist of OEBLegacy, have a short TED-Ed animated film entitled “Why should you read Octavia E. Butler?” (Pichardo-Espaillat 2019). Since 2015, “the Octavia E. Butler archive has been used nearly 1,300 times – or roughly 15 times per week – making it one of the most actively researched archives at The Huntington” (Dunkirk 2017). In fall of 2020, the Huntington accepted its first round of applications for the Octavia E. Butler Fellowship, which will fund scholars with a Ph.D. for a nine to twelve month research period “to make extensive use of the Butler archive” (https://www.huntington.org/available-fellowships).

2. According to the literature, the concept of “Third Reconstruction” in relation to American political development precedes the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber who published a book under the same name in 2016. The concept was first used by historian C. Vann Woodward in the mid-twentieth century in his book The Burden of Southern History (1960/2008) with the purpose of refocusing “southern whites on elements of their identity that did not rely solely on the maintenance of white supremacy and segregation” (Maxwell 2011, 79). Political scientists have taken up Woodward’s concept in the twenty-first century to trace various patterns from the first and second iterations of Reconstruction, where the Civil Rights era serves as the “Second Reconstruction,” including the demand for reparations (Balfour 2003), voting rights expansion (Valelly 2004), and the realignments of the two major political parties (Walton et al. 2011). Even with all this scholarly attention, the concept is a difficult one as evident recently when a highly regarded historian claimed perhaps correctly that our current moment has entered a “Third Reconstruction” but also claims, incorrectly, that “Donald Trump is the unifying force bringing together all those who have not been able to accept a black president. He is the leader, the spokesman, the CEO, as it is, of this ‘Third Reconstruction’” (Young 2018, xi). A few decades after Woodward’s book, Manning Marable (1984) adapted the concept of “Third Reconstruction” by recentering the leadership of Black, although largely male, abolitionists in the first two phases and thus underscoring that Reconstruction as project also included a shifting of economic ideology for the ultimate success of interracial democracy (i.e. the abolition of capitalism). Other scholars have followed Marable’s lead to center both Black agency (Foner 1993/2000), the insurgent struggle against the biopolitics of (neo)liberalism (Woods 2017), and the dismemberment of capitalism (Kelley 2020) in calling for and organizing toward a “Third Reconstruction.” Other scholars, mostly of law, focus on the institutional forms that emerged during the First and facilitated the successes of the Second Reconstruction – the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional Amendments. Using the concept of a “Third Reconstruction,” they call for the reconceptualization of equality beyond the achievement/treatment binary (Belton 1990), developing a “post-racialized human dignity” by abolishing the dichotomy of colorblindness and race consciousness in legal interpretation (Magee Andrews 2003), and recentering intersectionality as a mandate of the project of reconstruction (Primus 2018). Lastly, political scientist David Faris concludes It’s Time to Fight Dirty (2018), his genre bending popular book that combines social science analysis and speculative fiction, by projecting a “Third Reconstruction” emerging in the year 2023. I turn to the subfield of political theory and the work of Octavia E. Butler to theorize an abolitionist politics of self-care by combining the two common threads of the centrality of Black female leadership and of the importance of the speculative or imaginary extending from the First Reconstruction (1850–1880) through the Civil Rights Movement (or “Second Reconstruction”) to the current Movement for Black Lives (since 2013). Gender theorist Alys Eve Weinbaum (2013) has turned to Butler’s writings, but not the Parable series, to provide an analysis that brings together critical political economy and abolitionism in “The Afterlife of Slavery and the Problem of Reproductive Freedom.”

3. I use the term “racial capitalism” as developed by Cedric J. Robinson in Black Marxism: “The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism” (1983/2000, 2).