In Memory of Octavia E. Butler: Teaching Butler’s Fiction

Session Coordinator: Laura L. Beadling

Dept. of American Studies, Purdue University

University Hall

672 Oval Drive

West Lafayette, IN 47907-2087

beadling@purdue.edu

From Kindred to the Parables: Altering the Landscape of the African American Literary Canon

I have been writing about Octavia E. Butler since 1984. In American and African American Literature classes, in Women’s Studies classes, in American Studies Classes, and in irregular specialty topics courses like Science Fiction or “Slavery in the American Imagination, which I sometimes get to teach, I have taught various works by Octavia E. Butler over the years. The two texts I have used most often are Kindred and Wild Seed as each contains as much social and cultural history as science fiction. Both are ideal texts because of the fundamental historical and social issues questions they raise. I believe that because many more teachers and scholars have become acquainted with her work over the years; Butler has appeared more often in the college classroom and has attracted an ever greater audience than those she most claims—feminists, SF fans, and African Americans; to that list we can add college students. Teaching Butler in colleges and Universities has become almost as commonplace as teaching such major African American authors as Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. Indeed, for many of us, because of her careful crafting, her full and rich presentations of her protagonists, the engaging themes she hones and then presents to multiple audiences, Butler has become a “Major Figure” author, no longer “merely a science fiction writer.” My presentation will focus on Butler as such—a “Major Figure” who has reshaped the canon the college African American literature course.

Sandra Y. Govan

UNC Charlotte

sygovan@email.uncc.edu

What's Black about This? Teaching Octavia Butler in African American Literature Courses

The African American literary tradition proudly lays claim to Octavia Butler as the first prominent African American female science fiction writer. Much of that reputation rests, however, on her work that seemingly fits neatly with typically "black" themes like slavery. The Norton includes "Bloodchild" (a story often taken to be about slavery rather than about compromise) as a selection and the Oxford Companion singles out Kindred as Butler's most significant work.

In this paper, however, I will discuss the difficulty of easily fitting Butler into a course on African American literature. I have taught Butler on three occasions: I used Kindred in a course on the slave narrative in the African American imagination; and I've used Parable of the Sower twice, once as the final text in a Survey of African American literature and once in a graduate course on the intellectual in African American literature. While students have pretty good reactions to Kindred (in my class, and in the classes of my colleagues who teach the book regularly), I have found almost universal dislike for and dismay with Parable. I will argue that what students dislike about the book--that it isn't about black people or "black" issues--is exactly what makes Parable so compelling for the study of African American literature. While Butler certainly offers a story, in form and content, that looks very different than the kind of "protest" often associated with African American literature, Parable is nonetheless rooted in the African American literary tradition.

Consuela Francis

College of Charleston

francisc@cofc.edu

“To Touch Solid Evidence” – Implicated in the Past by Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred

I have taught Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred in three different contexts: an introductory course in African American literature offered by a department of Afro-American studies at a large state university in the Midwest; in an introductory course in American literature and in a first-year writing seminar, both at a small, private liberal arts university in the Upper South. In each case, Kindred has served a common purpose: to awaken students’ disquiet with the ways in which they are taught to view their relationship to the past, to offer tools with which to understand the limitations of that relationship, and then to suggest how they might begin to enact another conception of responsibility and temporality.

The consensus view of responsibility holds that an individual cannot be held accountable for events outside one’s life span. This assumes that the present is privileged, the past is gone, and the future lacks all reality until it becomes the present. Even so, in Kindred the past maintains a paradoxical priority over the present. Butler insists that individual life span and the flow of time are not rigid demarcations of responsibility. She advocates a conception of responsibility that relies instead on a symmetry of past, present, and future. If one’s expectations are not broad enough to encompass other times, Butler argues, one will inevitably make mortally threatening errors about the limits and implications of responsibility.

David LaCroix

Wake Forest University

lacroixd@wfu.edu