UC San Diego

My interdisciplinary research project contributes to the field of Octavia E. Butler Studies by documenting how Butler’s work bridges the theories of Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism, and Black Anarchism. In my dissertation, I connect my work as a Black Studies cultural practitioner and scholar to the MacArthur award-winning science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s deployment of Black speculative fiction and neo-slave narratives as a highly generative and necessary space for knowledge production. The analysis of Butler’s fiction and the Butler Papers, housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino California, reveals how Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and Black Anarchism are incredibly compatible when used to support each other and deeply generative when their tensions produce rigorous questions. Questions that by their nature cannot always be answered, but in that unanswerable tension, we have much to consider. Each of the three theories are fundamentally concerned with the violence of the human category in modernity, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and civil liberties, even as they enter these conversations differently. I argue each of these theories are also in line with Butler’s mission as a writer. Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism, and Black Anarchism are political theories which seek to educate, disrupt thinking, abate imperial global destruction, consider possibilities, and always remain in reflection of the past, present, and future. Due to this I not only analyze Black speculative fiction, via Butler’s work, I also contribute to creating it in multiple forms in dialogue with Butler’s work and Afrofuturist cultural production, which often takes the form of visual culture, such as comics and graphic novels, as well as literary fiction. My dissertation will be a synthesis of three creative projects and an analysis of Butler’s fiction and archival material, with an introduction and conclusion connecting the individual chapters. My dissertation constructs the theoretical basis for the importance of my three creative projects, as they connect to Butler’s unfinished screenplay “Bound Slave,” her short story “Childfinder,” and her interviews and archival material which reveal Butler had concerns about humanity, history, technology, and the future which raise questions and observations directly related to the theories of Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism, and Black Anarchism.