Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels
Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels

Author: Lin Knutson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-03-06

Total Pages: 111

ISBN-13: 1666903116

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Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels explores the ways in which Octavia Butler’s liminal protagonists undergo ritualized transformations while in exile from their home communities. During this process, they engage in psychological, physical, political, and social transitions through what Victor Turner and Makhail Bakhtin describe as carnivalesque identities. Using postcolonial, feminist, anti-capitalist, and African American theorists, Lin Knutson examines how Butler’s imagined genesis and history carry echoes of American history, slave history, debt slavery, and colonization.

Conversations with Octavia Butler
Conversations with Octavia Butler

Author: Octavia E. Butler

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781604732764

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The first collection of interviews with the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author of Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Fledgling, and Bloodchild

Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler's Work
Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler's Work

Author: Martin Japtok

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 3030466256

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Human Contradictions in Octavia Butler’s Work continues the critical discussions of Butler’s work by offering a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches to Butler’s text. This collection contains original essays that engage Butler’s series (Seed to Harvest, Xenogenesis, Parables), her stand-alone novels (Kindred and Fledgling), and her short stories. The essays explore new facets of Butler’s work and its relevance to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, religious studies, American studies, and U.S. history. The volume establishes new ways of reading this seminal figure in African American literature, science fiction, feminism, and popular culture.

The Actual Star
The Actual Star

Author: Monica Byrne

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 9780063002890

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David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas meets Octavia Butler's Earthseed series, as acclaimed author Monica Byrne (The Girl in the Road) spins a brilliant multigenerational saga spanning two thousand years, from the collapse of the ancient Maya to a far-future utopia on the brink of civil war. The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents --telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle. Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne ofa Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion and racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change. In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate--until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see. The Actual Star is a feast of ideas about where humanity came from, where we are now, and where we're going--and how, in every age, the same forces that drive us apart also bind us together.

Bloodchild and Other Stories
Bloodchild and Other Stories

Author: Octavia E. Butler

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1583228039

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A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability—and responsibility—to save humanity from itself? Like all of Octavia Butler’s best writing, these works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature’s strongest voices.

Wild Seed
Wild Seed

Author: Octavia E. Butler

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Published: 2023-03-28

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1538765446

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In an "epic, game-changing, moving and brilliant" story of love and hate, two immortals chase each other across continents and centuries, binding their fates together -- and changing the destiny of the human race (Viola Davis). Doro knows no higher authority than himself. An ancient spirit with boundless powers, he possesses humans, killing without remorse as he jumps from body to body to sustain his own life. With a lonely eternity ahead of him, Doro breeds supernaturally gifted humans into empires that obey his every desire. He fears no one -- until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is an entity like Doro and yet different. She can heal with a bite and transform her own body, mending injuries and reversing aging. She uses her powers to cure her neighbors and birth entire tribes, surrounding herself with kindred who both fear and respect her. No one poses a true threat to Anyanwu -- until she meets Doro. The moment Doro meets Anyanwu, he covets her; and from the villages of 17th-century Nigeria to 19th-century United States, their courtship becomes a power struggle that echoes through generations, irrevocably changing what it means to be human.

The Creolizing Subject
The Creolizing Subject

Author: Michael J. Monahan

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0823234495

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How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a politics of purity-an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Monahan calls for the emergence of a creolizing subjectivity that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race.

Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual
Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual

Author: Victor Turner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1501717197

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Drawing on two and a half years of field work, Victor Turner offers two thorough ethnographic studies of Ndembu revelatory ritual and divinatory techniques, with running commentaries on symbolism by a variety of Ndembu informants. Although previously published, these essays have not been readily available since their appearance more than a dozen years ago. Striking a personal note in a new introductory chapter, Professor Turner acknowledges his indebtedness to Ndembu ritualists for alerting him to the theoretical relevance of symbolic action in understanding human societies. He believes that ritual symbols, like botanists' stains, enable us to detect and trace the movement of social processes and relationships that often lie below the level of direct observation.

Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance

Author: Graham St. John

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9781845454623

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In the twenty years following Victor Turner's death, interventions on the interconnected performance modes of play, drama, and community (dimensions of which Turner deemed the limen), and experimental and analytical forays into the anthropologies of experience and consciousness, have complemented and extended Turnerian readings on the moments and sites of culture's becoming. Examining Turner's continued relevance in performance and popular culture, pilgrimage and communitas, as well as Edith Turner's role, the contributors reflect on the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early twenty-first century and explore how Turner's ideas have been re-engaged, renovated, and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance.