The year leading up to what would have been Butler’s platinum birthday was an open, decentralized, hybridized affair, its aspects dovetailing with the multi-vocal tendencies of her storytelling, the complex L.A.s (plural) her characters often inhabited. Butler Legacy Network that explored “the expansive ways Butler’s writing, research, and life foster deeper understanding of the past, present, and possible futures.”Īrtbound Episode: The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto Butler Studies: Convergence of an Expanding Field” a one-day conference co-convened by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey of the Octavia E. Conferences, performances and exhibitions spread across her native Southern California, from UC San Diego, to Clockshop, to the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, to the Armory Center for the Arts in her native Pasadena. Just last week, “The Huntington Library hosted “ Octavia E. Just as an Octavia Estelle Butler tale is never “just” a work of science fiction, the lives of Black women like Butler the world over are never just the limited, predictable, generic ways we talk about them.Ĭloser to ground, 2016 into 2017 in Los Angeles was “The Year of Octavia,” a 12-month experiment in telling unlimited, unpredictable, sui generis stories about Black people informed by close reading of Butler’s words. This is not just a matter of her fiction’s uncanny prescience on question of politics and climate but of the author’s larger intuition that Black lives and Black stories invariably exceed their assigned frames. Butler.,īutler’s emergent, unexpected utility has allowed her work to powerfully encapsulate a broad range of eras since the publication of her very first novel, “ Patternmaster,” in 1971 - post-Civil Rights, Reagan, so-called post-racial and so on. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Butler, Kindred (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y.: 1979), first edition. This slide from Shaping Change, a 2016 conference on Butler, suggests ten “emergent” approaches to activism that echo themes from Butler’s Parable books:
One school of thought promulgated by adrienne maree brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Walidah Imarisha mines Butler for “ emergent strategy,” the solutions crafted by her characters in response to their speculative obstacles suggesting new forms of real-world organizing and flesh-and-blood resistance. Butler studies” began considering the writer’s literary output from multiple angles: literary, political, climatological, scientific. Almost immediately after her untimely death in 2006, a growing field of what Pasadena-based scholar Ayana Jamieson straightforwardly terms “Octavia E. What we can say is that Butler remains an essential presence even in absence, her work not simply growing in esteem but taking on new coloring and resonance with each passing year. Butler, notes on writing, “No entertainment on earth…” ca.
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