Hopkins and Butler: Black Women Body Sense

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This session considers how the foundational works of Pauline Hopkins and Octavia E. Butler use imagination to create a sensorial, expansive understanding of race, gender, and the changing bodily form. Rudrani Sarma’s “‘In the water… we see the future’: Imaging Black Futures in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood” argues that Hopkins's proto-science fiction novel Of One Blood (1902-3) imagines futuristic technologies that resemble mainstream devices like X-rays and tools from alternative healing traditions like Rosicrucianism and animal magnetism. Characters use water as an advanced visual technology to map traumatic bodily inheritances from the past and scan the future. Amadi Ozier’s “Infectious Laughter, Pauline Hopkins’s Mammy, and the Living Ghost” argues that in Of One Blood Hopkins demonstrates that miscegenation anxiety disguises a shared, sublimated desire to invert the schematic racial hierarchy by, as Fanon once wrote, “changing Whites into Blacks.” “Racial transmigration” is an American anxiety: black actors will gain access to white spaces by replacing white people. Alexandria Smith’s “‘The Long Remembered Dolphin Form’: Octavia E. Butler and the Body’s Knowing” considers Anyanwu, a protagonist of Wild Seed (1980), as an ecological actor. Through heightened capacities for sensory manipulation, Anyanwu exemplifies an ecologically oriented Black feminist knowledge production process. Emerson Zora Hamsa’s “Black Obscurant: Antehuman Praxis in Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed” frames Butler’s novel through critical historical speculation that rejects a western historical project that organizes itself through the antiblack logics of the human. The novel, instead, presents a past that eschews historical narratives that privilege self-making through the possession of the black form. Together, our panel describes how Hopkins and Butler use the black speculative to generate new, fluid possibilities for black metaphysical form.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Rudrani Sarma, Rutgers University

Individual Presentations

• “‘In the water… we see the future’: Imaging Black Futures in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood” - Rudrani Sarma, Rutgers University

• “Infectious Laughter, Pauline Hopkins’s Mammy, and the Living Ghost” - amadi ozier, UW-Madison

• “‘The Long-Remembered Dolphin Form’: Octavia Butler and the Body’s Knowing” - Alexandria Smith, University of Virginia