Knowing that the end was near, I tried today to make sense of this semester’s work in what I think was the most effective way. I reread “Bloodchild.” I have heard it echoed across the blog and in the classroom that in order to make sense of what we were doing at any point, there always seemed to be value in recalling “Bloodchild.” So, I began to wonder what it was about Butler’s short story that stood out to me as emblematic of the class. Continue reading “The Art of Reflection through “Bloodchild””
Revisiting Contract Theory, Possession, and Democracy in Class
Today’s (11/27) class was tough. I had this sense that there were twenty-seven different visions of our final project and the necessity of creating just one vision out of those twenty-seven troubled me. Continue reading “Revisiting Contract Theory, Possession, and Democracy in Class”
Freudian Revisionism, Human-Oankali Relationships, and the Role of Stigmergy
In this post, I would like to address the question of Freud’s survival as well as the dynamics of ingroup and outgroup relations in Dawn as they both can be understood as examples of stigmergy. Here is an article from this summer that explores the ways in which Freud makes his way into modern psychology and other fields of study.
Continue reading “Freudian Revisionism, Human-Oankali Relationships, and the Role of Stigmergy”
Negation and Identity
The growing anticipation surrounding Ta Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, prompted me to go back and read his essay from The Atlantic “The First White President,” a selection from the book about the ways in which Donald Trump used his whiteness to reach the presidency. Coates’s main argument is that Trump’s rise to power had everything to do with his being the negation of a black president. As I looked at the selection a second time, I recalled the language of negation worked to categorize humans and otherwise in Clay’s Ark and Fledgling.
“What’s in a Name?” Categorization in Butler’s Fiction and Romeo+Juliet
In an interview with Randall Kenan, Octavia Butler spends a great deal of time resisting the labels Kenan presents to her. Immediately, she is contrary to the idea that her writing might be “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction or fantasy (Francis, 27). While reading “Bloodchild,” select interviews with Butler, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet I considered the ways language categorizes people and what the resistance to such labels says about those people. In this post, I tried to reconcile my readings with what Butler talks about in her interviews. Continue reading ““What’s in a Name?” Categorization in Butler’s Fiction and Romeo+Juliet”