‘Along with writing, my particular passion was for the news. The trends of today that become the disasters of tomorrow.’ - Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler’s voluminous archive pays testament to a lifelong commitment to scrutinizing the world around her. Comprising over 300 boxes, Butler’s collected documents include newspaper clippings on science and technology stories, photographs, notes, letters and manuscript drafts. Her notes reveal a keen and early awareness of the threat posed by climate change in particular: a concern dramatized in the two novels comprising her Parable series.
This talk will read such archival documents alongside Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents as novels of a genre in which ‘geographies of the everyday… are expressed in a medium that can take on difference’: visionary works (after adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha) that, far from being straightforwardly prophetic, reveal a complex relationship between social change and black women’s archival practice, and model ethical and methodological approaches to the issues we face in the 21st century.
Supported by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University