Feminist discourses in science fiction (1970’s to present) characteristically interrogate oppression rooted in class, race, and gender. Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn, published in 1987, is the first in her Xenogensisis trilogy, a novel transfixed by the concept of alien subjectivity, to complicate metaphors of race as creative tool of resistance. Oankali an alien species rescues a few survivors from the shell of a nuclear devastated Earth and among them is Lilith Iyapo an African American. As far as the Onakali are concerned, a mixed breed of species that is part Oankali part “human” is the answer to their own survival as well as that of humans, making Lilith’s plight ultrafantastic. The plot of the story revolves around Lilith’s colonization, resistance, and transformation. After twenty five years of sleep, she awakes in a room (which she later learns is a living organism) gasping for air. She is colonized, alone, and estranged the new scar on her abdomen one of several signs that she clearly “did not own herself any longer.” (5) Eventually she realizes that her only realistic means of survival lies in her willingness to accept reviled difference. I begin with Butler’s Dawn because within the scope of the entire Xenogenesis trilogy is depicted the nexus of cultural and spiritual tropes informing Butler’s alien construction as quintessential change agent, the symbiotic marker of boundary transgression, moreover, requisite personal transformation.
However, complicating tropes of alien identity in Butler’s narrative is the tripod of competing and sometimes paradoxical theoretical epistemes located in feminist, science fiction, and African American discourses. In a 1988 interview with Larry McCaffery, Butler notes, “I really have three fairly distinct audiences: feminists, SF fans, and black readers.”[1] In keeping with her awareness of audience, these discourses are tightly interwoven throughout her narratives.
Far more challenging is that no black science/speculative feminist theory exists
(at least not all located in one volume) despite the fact that women of color are reading and writing speculative fiction. My response to this curious situation, while writing the dissertation Africentric Transgressive Creativity: A Reader’s Meditation on Octavia Butler, was employment of the term transgressive creativity coined to privilege an African womanist reading of meaning in Butler’s fiction: black women’s history, knowledge, creativity, spirituality, and experience. Over a decade later, the book I have in mind (of which one chapter is the proposed focus here) is a collection of essays written by women writers of color addressing theoretical, cultural, and spiritual nuances peculiar to our speculative fiction.
[1] Larry McCaffery, Across the Wounded Galaxies (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 54.
