Jade Saffery (California State University - Long Beach)
jade@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This allied session is open to all papers that explore Octavia E. Butler’s oeuvre, but because Butler’s literature evidently lives in the past, present, and future—within the fictional worlds she builds and in our world as her readers—we are particularly interested in papers that engage with her work in relation to the conference theme, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.”

Octavia E. Butler identified herself as a histofuturist, meticulously tracing patterns from the past to better inform her present and imagine speculative futures. Characters like Dana Franklin, Lilith Iyapo, Asha Vere, or Lauren Olamina often confront a similar undertaking, navigating echoes from their pasts in order to secure their futures. Like a palimpsest, traces from the past haunt the present and future in Octavia E. Butler’s works, in ways both discernible and unconscious.

Some particular topics of interest for this session include (but are by no means limited to):

· Post-apocalyptic sites of memory or the scorched California landscape as a palimpsest in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

· Nostalgic views of the past and their connection with physical violence in the Parables

· The creation of palimpsests by Asha Vere in Parable of the Talents

· Preserving memories in Earthseed texts and in Lauren’s journal in the Parables

· The body as palimpsest (embodied and genetic memory) in Kindred and Lilith’s Brood

· Kindred as a neo-slave narrative

· Queered time, time travel, and interplay between past and present, especially in Kindred

· Erasure and recovery of memory in Fledgling and Lilith’s Brood

· Alien echoes of historic human colonization in Bloodchild and Lilith’s Brood

· Film, television, and musical adaptations of Octavia E. Butler’s work as palimpsests: what is rewritten, what is erased, what haunts?

· Butler as a prophet: are her predictions haunting us?

· What it means to be a histofuturist, as Butler herself identified