Octavia Butler

Catalog description

MacArthur Genius grant winner Octavia Butler is famously known as a science fiction writer, but her novels, short stories and essays both adhere to and disrupt expectations in the genre. Throughout her writing career, Butler explored themes of space travel, time travel, African indigeneity, gender, race, spirituality, and ecological degradation. This class, will introduce students to Octavia Butler's work and the creative fields she helped spawn. Additionally, we will investigate and contextualize these themes alongside the scholarly fields of Black feminist studies, the environmental humanities, Black speculation fiction, Afrofuturism, disability studies and more!