Afrofuturism, Octavia Butler and the Embattled Black Woman's Body

This dissertation analyzes the works of visionary Afrofuturist writer Octavia Estelle Butler, focusing on collapsing binaries of race, gender, time, and space through her representations of dystopia and utopia within the African diaspora. The paradox of her work can be captured in the home-looking or home-going aspect of Sankofa. Sankofa is a metaphor and a philosophical framework rooted in the Akan language and cultural traditions of Ghana on the West Coast of Africa. Sankofa is widely expressed visually in Africa and the diaspora as a female bird with its head turned backward while its feet face forward, carrying a precious egg in its mouth. Sankofa is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” which translates as: “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” The idea of “going back for that which you have forgotten” is central to Butler’s relationship to history and her work’s message for future readers. Like this avian image of Sankofa from Ghana, Butler’s speculative fiction, set in the African American past, traces that past to the present. In order to forecast a future that leads to a reverberating demise of dystopian despair, her novels imagine emancipation for Black women. As in the works of her predecessors, nineteenth-century writers like Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Ruth Todd, Butler’s fiction demonstrates the extreme vulnerability of the bodies of Black women, as has been shown in innumerable histories of the Middle Passage, the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and other forms of constructed inequalities. Butler’s science fiction may be read as a chronicle of the unrelenting subjugation of the bodies of Black women. However, she insists that these bodies can prevail, but to do that, Black women must engage in perpetual resurrections enabled by intensified embodied experiences that transcend time and space.