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.

Small fires in Black American women’s literature have been briefly and disconnectedly studied by numerous scholars. No scholar thus far, however, has aggregated the multitudinous symbolic presentations of small fire in Black American women’s literature. This thesis performs a literary criticism of several texts written by several Black American female authors, all of which contain deliberate uses of small fire. The conclusive product is a revelation of the way small fire functions within Black American women’s literature to imitate the cycle of the legendary phoenix—birth, flight, self-combustion, and rebirth—and to catalyze the multi-generational uplift that exists for Black American women who indefatigably create personal, domestic, and community renewal, and who undauntedly combat systems of racial, sexual, economic, and patriarchal oppression.

Anthropogenic factors contributing to more frequent and extreme weather-related events are displacing vulnerable populations and increasing the global number of food-insecure climate refugees. As food sovereignty is essential to combating climate change and ensuring sustainable futures – according to the Declaration of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda – it is important to examine accepted practices in the food industry that may threaten the sovereignty of vulnerable groups. The aim of this thesis is to explore two climate fiction novels – Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl – and how they demonstrate the connection between problematic practices in the food industry and lost food sovereignty. I also examine the novels through the lens of international documents such as the 2030 Agenda. Each novel, I argue, contributes to a growing awareness about the importance of protecting first rights to indigenous and local foods and land, or food sovereignty. The environmental humanities, and climate fiction specifically, are also contributing to a better understanding of the detrimental effects that lost sovereignty has on a people’s culture and the future sustainability of the planet. Climate fiction, as these novels illustrate, can provide case studies for understanding the inextricable link between humans and nature and allow people to imagine a better future. Placed within larger contexts that illuminate the current need for global campaigns for food sovereignty and United Nations agendas such as the 2030 Agenda, literature which demonstrates the human relationship to food can be used to enrich and strengthen application of the Agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. Through imagery of seeds and regeneration, Butler and Bacigalupi illuminate the critical role of seed-carriers, or bearers of food knowledge, in intergenerational food education and sustainability. Their novels demonstrate links between environmental injustices and food insecurities – violence and displacement of climate refugees in Parable of the Sower, and biopiracy and food totalitarianism in The Windup Girl – that help readers better understand the potential power of the SDGs for planning food futures.