“‘The Long-Remembered Dolphin Form’: Octavia Butler and the Body’s Knowing”

• In Event: Hopkins and Butler: Black Women Body Sense

Description for Program

Octavia Butler’s prescient imagination, made manifest in her body of speculative literature, is often cited by Black feminist scholars, activists, and artists who are interested in the ways the history and contemporary contexts of Black life and existence might inform various Black futures. While not taking on the mantle of Black feminism herself, Butler’s lifetime of work provides ample opportunity to understand gender expansively in the contexts of Black and other-than-human existence. In Octavia Butler’s writing, we often find characters interpreted as Black women and girls who wield unconventional forms of power mediated through their bodily senses. In this presentation, I consider the ecological significance of Anyanwu, protagonist of Butler’s Wild Seed (1980), a nearly immortal Black woman with more-than-human sensory capacities. Her heightened capacities for sensory manipulation allow her to change shape, swim through Atlantic ocean waters, and fly through North American airspace in ways that other beings are not able to. In so doing, Anyanwu’s physiological and cognitive senses of the environment are changed and heightened. Through her pursuit of meaningful and ontologically confounding forms of community with nonhuman animals, Anyanwu invites readers to consider an ecologically oriented Black feminist knowledge production process.

Author

• Alexandria Smith, University of Virginia