This special session consisting of four presenters will explore her legacy. The title, "Butler at 76," aims at offering a retrospective and advancing various aspects of Butler scholarship. Each participant will speak for no more than twelve minutes, followed by, hopefully, 25 minutes of unstructured discussion. The work of each presenter has been chosen with an eye to addressing a different text and subject so that the range of discussion will be wide ranging.
Gabbard in "Lilith’s 'Choice': The Double Bind of Caregiving in Octavia Butler’s Dawn" interrogates how caregivers are caught between the moral imperative to care and the cost that care exacts. Women, and especially BIPOC women, find themselves confronting the irreconcilable demands of having to sacrifice their present agency and earnings and future security while comprehending the necessity of the care work they must perform. Gabbard suggests that Dawn illustrates how care dynamics work within small social collectivities. He employs ethics of care, a rigorous theory exploring subjects’ interrelationality and a major field in political and feminist philosophy (Kittay, Engster, and others), to examine the double bind of Lilith, a Black human woman. More than once, Lilith must choose between two undesirable courses of action: foregoing her present well being and future security or refusing the care work she feels morally obligated to carry out.
Friedman in "Octavia Butler and the Question of Reparations" examines how Fledgling engages with questions about legal reparations for racial injustice. These questions have a long history in the U.S. and have been posed with renewed urgency during the past two years. Fledgling uses a fantastical justice system—the Ina Council of Judgement—to reflect with nuance of the question of how and to what extent the law can be used to redress racial injustice. Friedman argues that Fledgling suggests that legal mechanisms can be used strategically to offer limited protection to people impacted by structural violence; however, Fledgling also draws attention to the limits of reparations enacted through the law. While taking the need for reparations seriously, Butler’s work also cautions against excessive faith in the law as an instrument of justice.
Schindler in "Dreaming South: Latin America in the Octavia E. Butler Papers" explores Butler's relationship with Latin America through the lens of her personal papers (conserved at the Huntington Library). Butler used Spanish to various purposes. It was a "secret code" and a place of retreat. Elsewhere, the language allowed her to forge connections with others. In the margins of page proofs and in the lines of the notebooks where she generated ideas for stories, she developed the voice of an internal editor in Spanish. She wove references to the histories, cultures and ecologies of Latin America and the Caribbean into several novels. Undeniably an advocate of multiculturalism, she was also particularly interested in the Spanish-speaking Americas as a site for speculative, liberatory futures.
Stekl in "Kindred Temporalities" investigates how Kindred not only exposes the racialized stakes of time travel for Black subjects, but speaks to current debates in Black studies about subjectivity and temporality. They read Kindred in conversation with Afropessimist and Afrofuturist approaches to the question of time. In terms of Afropessimism, both the narrative structure and the content of Kindred illustrate the two-way dependence of the present upon the anti-Black racial relations of the antebellum past, which goes along with the dependence of the past upon the present, through which alone it is accessed, interpreted, and (re)produced. In terms of Afrofuturism, Kindred gestures toward the fugitive potentiality that inheres in this temporal structure of repetition, a potentiality Dana exercises when she finally kills her slave-owning (great-great-great) grandfather and literalizes the age-old grandfather paradox. Ultimately, they argue that Butler reveals the complex and contradictory ways in which time itself is racialized; Kindred offers a halting, quasi-cyclical temporality wherein the present, though never wholly reducible to the past, is inseparably interwoven with the subjection – and the resistance – of the latter.