Seeds of a Postcolonial “New World”
in Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild

Feature essay for Tamawuj, a Sharjah Biennial 13 platform, May 2017

Excerpt

In the many worlds set forth in her speculative fiction, which has vividly imagined the possibilities of telepathic communication and hyper-empathy, interspecies breeding and symbiosis, traumatic returns to the past of chattel slavery and dystopian visions of a future marked by social collapse, Butler has explored how racism, sexism, and other systems of hierarchy are constructed, transfigured, and challenged at those moments when humans confront alien beings and environments. Whether they are situated in historically recognizable contexts or placed at a distance through sci-fi premises and the sustained mediation of allegory, Butler’s narratives reflect and refract challenges and tensions inherent in our own societies, while drawing from history and evolutionary biology to present the urgent necessity of living with others differently. Crucially, in so doing, her fiction often features women of color as protagonists who instigate processes of social transformation in their roles as intellectual and spiritual leaders.