![]() ![]() ![]() In Butler's Parable of the Talents, set in 2032, Senator Jarret says enemies of America are rapists and they are trying to destroy the country. She wrote a dystopian novel in 1998 that had a fictional presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steele Jarret, with an eerily similar slogan: "Help us make America great again." ![]() "The line of 'Make America great again,' the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago," Trump told The Hillin 2015.īut novelist Octavia Butler would have to disagree. If we were to ask Trump, surely he would say it came straight from his own brilliant brain. But where did presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's campaign slogan originate? The aim of this paper is to explore Butler's success in illustrating different aspects of this posthumanist understanding."Make America Great Again" is stitched in hats and printed on bumper stickers all across America. Considering the novels as science fictions of neo-slavery, in this paper I discuss slavery as an encompassing concept of humanist understanding which gradual disappearance, along with the falling of the wall, signifies the emergence of posthumanist understanding in the novels. Introducing Earthseed, the protagonist develops a posthumanist perspective that is symbolized through the falling of the wall in the novels and offers new understanding of the sociocultural concepts and aspects away from the hierarchical order. This humanism is illustrated through focusing on the role of Christianity as a religious discourse that prioritizes certain sociocultural concepts and aspects. This is done through focusing on the struggle of a black female reformer who, by introducing a religion called Earthseed, challenges the humanist understanding in the novels. In this article I will apply Daphne Hampson's Post-Biblical Perspective to investigate the metaphor of wall as the reflection of a humanist perspective in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (2007a) and Parable of the Talents (2007b). I argue that Butler’s presentation of hyperempathy demonstrates that sharing experience is not a panacea for human and non-human relations but a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension. Against assumptions that interconnectivity necessarily precipitates more ethical modes of being in the world, Butler challenges static claims about shared substance and experience by providing a more complex depiction of what it means to feel as others do. Butler’s hyperempathy-a condition causing possessors to have an embodied response to visual perception of others’ emotions-provides a speculation on the consequences of the felt, interconnectivity of beings that “sympoiesis” characterizes. Before the popularization of affect theory and new materialism, Octavia E. In other words, if both current scientific and philosophical conceptions of life attest that beings are always already co-constituted by their surroundings, we can no longer rely on a model of subjectivity and personhood that presupposes clear, bounded individuation. In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la lettre, prefiguring problems we are perhaps only now in a position to address academically. ![]() It builds on recent research with online sf reading communities which is interested in how reading and discussing speculative fiction online is generative for collectively negotiating radically altered presents and futures (see Chambers and Garforth, 2020 Iossifidis 2018 a, b and Iossifiids and Garforth, forthcoming). I cautiously suggest that this creative, collaborative, caring sf reading practice constitutes a form of ambiguously hopeful sustenance. In exploring how readers seek out and engage with utopian and critically dystopian fictions that nourish the capacity for individual and collective resistance and struggle, this piece - and the wider project it is part of - seeks to ground some of the claims made by science fiction scholars, about the radical potential of sf (see Moylan, 2000, Jameson, 2005) by attending qualitatively to ordinary reading practices. Through an attentiveness to the knowledge production of readers, it is a modest addition to recent work which seeks to explore the relationship between speculative climate fiction and political change (Milkoreit 2016 Schneider-Mayerson, 2018 Harris, 2020 Yazell 2020). It builds on recent calls for a reinvigorated cultural sociology of reading that is attentive to how ‘the very exposure through fictional texts to the plurality of the human condition, its vulnerability and its strengths, opens up for readers the possibility of conceiving and making sense of change in themselves and their situation’ (Thumala Olave, 2018: 449). This short piece explores the social and situated practices of collectively negotiating speculative fiction over video conferencing software across different time zones. ![]()
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