Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Science Fiction For Everyone

2020; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5621/sciefictstud.47.3.0515

2327-6207

Alexander -,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

515 BOOKS IN REVIEW Science Fiction For Everyone. Tarshia Stanley, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler. New York: MLA, 2019. 176 pp. $65 hc, $29 pbk. A productive tension frames the discussion of Octavia E. Butler and African American speculative fiction in Tarshia Stanley’s introduction to this collected volume. Of Butler’s works, an initial survey sent to academics across the US yielded the perhaps unsurprising result that Kindred (1979) is her “most popular text assigned” to largely undergraduate-level classes, with “Bloodchild” (1984) the “most assigned short story” (4). In her comprehensive overview of African American speculative fiction, Stanley rightly asserts that “social and political realism no longer [sets] the parameters of African American contemporary literature… [and] African American literature worthy of critique can lie outside social protest” (9). How, then, do teachers and pedagogues proceed beyond the familiar and recognizable neo-slave narrative trappings of a text such as Kindred, and acknowledge the strangeness, generic hybridity, and at times discomforting nature of Butler’s oeuvre? Stanley, president of the Octavia E. Butler Society and Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences at St. Catherine University, brings her scholarly focus on speculative fiction, Black feminist studies, and African American literature to bear in curating an excellent selection of articles that carry out precisely this work. The contributors to the volume model an impressive range of critical and disciplinary approaches to teaching Butler both within and beyond the context of African American Studies. Organized for the newcomer as well as for the seasoned Butler scholar, the volume begins with a short informational section called “Materials”: this includes a chronological bibliography of Butler’s major works followed by listings of “Texts Taught in Conjunction with Butler’s Works,” “Courses and Contexts,” “Interviews,” and “Secondary Sources.” While not exhaustive, these sections are helpful for opening discussion. The second section, “Approaches,” is much more substantive, a number of scholarly essays showcasing the sheer disciplinary range that Butler’s works enable. “Approaches” is itself split into several subsections that move from literary readings to strategies for social justice before ending with Afrofuturism and a consideration of Butler as a prophetic author for future politics. Many of the chapters, however, assume an unfamiliar at best, resistant at worst, student attitude towards science fiction, an attitude that Butler’s multifaceted and thematically protean texts help to alter. As a rule, the articles strike a satisfying balance among quite different thematic approaches, and the ordering of the chapters makes for often provocative and productive contrasts. The first subsection covers “Literary and Rhetorical Approaches.” Since Butler’s work is most often taught in literary disciplines, this is the logical way to begin. John Paul Riquelme’s framing of Dawn (1987) as a modernist work places the novel as the final text on a syllabus that includes Dracula (1897), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), A Passage to India (1924), and Sula (1973). He connects anthropological themes among the novels on this syllabus, but, somewhat problematically, he represents Dawn as implicitly easier (although not escapist, as Riquelme reports his 516 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) students expressing in surprise) in comparison with the “difficulty of modernist writing” (19). Nonetheless, his approach is useful in teaching students “who normally would not read a work of science fiction” (20) and for constructing syllabi to include historically marginalized authors in a more conservative institutional context. Moving from the thematic to the historically specific, the next chapter firmly situates Butler as “one of the most important pioneers of speculative fiction in the African American literary tradition” (24). Matthew Mullins stages a thoughtful discussion of the problems of representation of Black subjects in “African American art and history” (25); texts such as Parable of the Sower (1993), he argues, are both backward- and forward-looking in their acknowledging histories of oppression while imagining futures that offer alternatives. Mullins’s chapter, like many in the volume, includes concrete exercises and questions to open up discussion of Butler’s works, recognizing as a common theme of each chapter the difficult reactions Butler’s texts provoke in students, and the complex conversations they enable. Later...