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Science Fiction II: Race, Gender, and the Body

Session 9 - Sunday 4:30-6:00pm
Henry Hall 207
Presiding Officer: 
Melissa Axelrod
Session Chair (if other than PO): 
Ritch Calvin
  1. Revitalizing the Present and Reimagining the Future by Renewing the Past: Reconstructing Race and Gender in Contemporary African American Science Fiction. Dierdre Powell, Anne Arundel Community College

    This paper will examine the contemporary African American science fiction of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Steven Barnes’ Lion’s Blood (2002) which historically reconstructs or re-imagines the African American cultural experience to understand the modern condition of racial and gender power dynamics.

  2. Science Fiction Sankofa: Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis through the Lenses of African-American Historiography, Afrofuturism, and Posthumanism. Mark Young, University of California, Riverside

    This paper reads Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy against the discourses of African-American Historiography, Afrofuturism, and Posthumanism, ultimately arguing that her work exemplifies the now-iconic Ghanaian concept of Sankofa--the bird whose head must face the past for the body to fly forward.

  3. “Alien Procedures”: Science Fiction and Slavery in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”. Carina Evans, Southwestern University

    Through use of metaphor in “Bloodchild,” Octavia Butler creates a dystopic scenario that references a terrifyingly familiar American past. “Bloodchild”’s futuristic analogy explores the psychology of American slavery, examining the experience of death-bound subjectivity and the machinery of coercion.

Session Type: 
Standing Session
Session Status: 
Closed