Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler's Work

Introduction Jerry Rafiki Jenkins and Martin Japtok.- The Somatopic Black Female Body within Archipelagic Space and Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed Regina Hamilton.- Contextualizing Escape in the Neo-Slave Narratives of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose   Allison E. Francis.- (Dis)abling Normalcy: Octavia Butler’s Critique of Disability in Kindred Hillary Weiss.- Transhumanism, Posthumanism, and the Human in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Jerry Rafiki Jenkins.- “But all we really know that we have is the flesh”: Body-Knowledge, Mulatto Genomics, and Reproductive Futurities in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis K.A. Vado.- “Your Body Has Made a Different Choice”: Troubling Issues of Consent in Dawn Joshua Yu Burnett.- What Is “Love”? —Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” Martin Japtok.- “Accept the Risk”: Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” and Institutional Power Beth A. McCoy.- “Learn or Die”: Survival and Anarchy in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower Stefanie Dunning.- Survival by any Means: Race and Gender, Passing and Performance in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents Micah Moreno.- Beyond Science Fiction: Genre in Kindred and Butler’s Short Stories Heather Duerre Humann.

Martin Japtok is Associate Professor of English at Palomar College, USA, and has authored Growing Up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction (2005), edited Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. (2003), and co-edited Authentic Blackness/”Real” Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture (2011) .

Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is Professor of English at Palomar College, USA, and is the author of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction (2019) and co-editor of Authentic Blackness/”Real” Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture (2011).