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alyssa collins (opens in a new tab)Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, University of South Carolina
In 2021, alyssa collins (opens in a new tab) received a one-year Octavia E. Butler Scholarship from The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens (opens in a new tab) in San Marino, Calif.
Butler, whose lectures are held at Huntington, was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant. A pioneering writer in a genre long dominated by white men, her work explored power structures, shifting definitions of humanity, and alternative societies.
In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Collins explains how Butler’s boundless curiosity inspired the author’s work and how Butler’s experiences as a black woman drew her to “humans who must deal with limits or the extremes of humanity.
butler, who died in 2006 (opens in a new tab)would have turned 75 on June 22, 2022.
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How did you become interested in Octavia E. Butler?
I first read Butler’s work in a graduate course on feminist literature and theory. We read “Parable of the Sower (opens in a new tab)“, an apocalyptic novel published in 1993 but set in the United States of the 21st century. I was really intrigued by the prophetic nature of the novel. But I wanted to know if he had something more strange in his list of antecedents.
I managed to get my hands on “Bloodchild (opens in a new tab)“, an award-winning short story that came out in 1984 about aliens and male pregnancy. After reading that story, I was pretty hooked.
Can you give us an idea of the scope of this collection, in terms of volume and value, and how much you were able to read during your fellowship?
The Octavia E. Butler Collection consists of manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, research materials, and ephemera. It is housed in 386 boxes, one volume, two binders, and 18 side binders.
As you can imagine, it’s a lot of material collected, so much so that when I started my fellowship, the curator who processed the collection told me I wouldn’t be able to see everything.
I have spent most of my time working with Butler’s research materials, his correspondence with authors, and his drawing materials, including his notes and notebooks. I found that the contents of these notebooks have been an invaluable window into Butler’s scientific thinking.
What was one of the most surprising things you learned about Butler from the collection?
Even given what I knew about Butler as a celebrated writer and academic, each day spent on her archive only increased the amount of esteem I hold for her. I was continually amazed not only at the breadth of her interests and the depth of her knowledge, but also at the way she was able to synthesize seemingly disparate topics.
His interest in topics like slime mold, cancer, and biotechnology come through in his stories in ways readers might not expect. He takes Butler’s interest in symbiogenesis. (opens in a new tab), an evolutionary theory based on cooperation rather than Darwinian competition. In “Bloodchild,” in which humans help insect-like aliens procreate, readers can see Butler probing this theory by imagining different ways humans might interact and evolve with other species.
Her project is called “Cellular Blackness: Octavia E. Butler’s Posthuman Ontology.” What is posthumanism and how does it relate to Butler’s work?
My book project grew out of a project I started in grad school that was interested in how 20th-century speculative black writers imagined and interacted with a field of thought called posthumanism. (opens in a new tab). Posthumanism scholars ponder the limits of what makes us human, or how we define humanity, and whether there are couplings with technology that could make us posthuman now or in the future.
I wanted to know how black writers were engaging with the idea or concept of posthumanism when blackness had historically been imagined to be inhuman. (opens in a new tab) —in, for example, justifications for the transatlantic slave trade, Jim Crow segregation, and ongoing state violence against blacks.
What interested me about Butler’s work is that his writing constantly depicts humans having to deal with the limits or extremes of humanity. She also puts important decisions about humanity in the hands of black female characters, individuals who have been dehumanized or erased. My book project looks at how Butler imagines these defining moments and how she sees humanity defined and realized in her novels.
What about this idea of ”cellular blackness”?
It seems that Butler’s own speculative investigation of humanity occurs not on the scale of bodies, but on the scale of cells.
In Butler’s 1987 novel “Dawn,” a black woman named Lilith considers helping a group of aliens who are interested in interbreeding with humans in a way that would effectively “end” the human race. Lilith, who has a history of cancer in her family and a tumor that the aliens removed, has what the aliens call a “cancer talent.” They are interested in the possibilities that could be derived from the regulation of cell growth.
Turns out Butler was interested in the Henrietta Lacks story. (opens in a new tab), a 31-year-old black cancer patient whose tumor cells were collected without his knowledge at Johns Hopkins in 1951. Unlike the other samples that had been collected in the lab over the years, Lacks reproduced quickly and remained alive even after Lacks’ death. that same year. To this day, his prolific cell line, called HeLa cells (opens in a new tab) — are used around the world to study cancer cells and the effects of various treatments.
In his unpublished notes, Butler envisions what HeLa cells, with their endless replication, could offer other than the death of a person. In works like “Dawn,” Butler can be seen thinking of cell replication as a concept that extends humanity, either in symbiosis with other species or through human evolution.
The “Parable (opens in a new tab)The books, which were written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s, have seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years. Butler’s vision of the near future in these works, with society on the brink due to looming environmental catastrophe, runaway corporate greed, and worsening economic inequality, seems prescient. Did his time in the collection give him any new perspective? about its enduring relevance?
Butler makes it clear that the problems of extreme climate change, income inequality, capitalist exploitation, housing shortages, racial bias, and the defunding of education are not new problems.
I read a lot—newspapers, science textbooks, anthropological tomes, fiction, self-help books—and thought deeply about what I read. I think Butler just took what he learned from these sources, which hinted at where things were going, and imagined what the not-too-distant future would be like if nothing ever got fixed.
Well, as Butler shows us, these problems haven’t been fixed and have only gotten worse in the 30-plus years since he wrote the books.
The protagonist of the first “Parable” novel, Lauren, creates a belief system called “Earthseed”. It contains slogans for change, for example “God is change” and “Anything you change, changes you”, and I think Butler hoped that Earthseed would encourage people to change the world in some meaningful way. These books feel relevant because there are still so many people interested in driving, imagining, and making change.
Laura Erskine, a writer for the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina, contributed to this article.
This article is republished from The conversation (opens in a new tab) under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article (opens in a new tab).
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