Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2022, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Butler's choice of using the diary of a young Black girl and of making that Black girl a leader is directly paralleled in real history via diaries, such as The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Butler's use of the journaling technique via a Black woman ties the future to the past as the diaries of these influential Black women are read by later generations giving a glimpse of what dreams, hopes, and goals the women had for the Black Community. She further gives cautionary tales of “if-this-continues to-go-on” as a warning for the community to be on its guard, but also to look out for the young women who will become the leaders of tomorrow. Using a journal, Butler ties together Afrofuturism, the history of Black women and the Black Community, and the power of private words in public spaces. In this thesis, I will demonstrate that Butler's novels create a full cycle of how Black women's personal writings are influential by allowing a glimpse of the past, present, and future in the Earthseed series. I will further argue that it is through such Afrofuturist writings that the Black community can envision space that includes them, as both citizens and as leaders. Scholars of Afrofuturism have not discussed the importance of Lauren Olamina's journals to the authentic Black experience of the future. Scholars of journaling have focused on the individual healing process and not on the uplift of the Black community. By doing so, Butler's novels have fallen into the cracks and have been left unnoticed in the novels' revelatory meanings.

Committee: Julie Burrell (Committee Chair); Rachel Carnell (Advisor); Jeff Karem (Advisor) Subjects: African American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2021, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

There has been great scholarly debate over the genre categorization of Kindred, yet there is a lot of missing scholarship regarding the situation of Kindred within the Black Power Movement of the 1970s. This piece emphasizes Octavia Butler's placement of Kindred within the greater scope of the Black Power Movement and her reasoning for doing so. As an extension of the Black Power Movement, the education aspect of the novel is greatly overlooked, and the main goal with this work is to emphasize the importance of education within the novel, more specifically as it is situated within the Black Studies Movement. As education is important, Butler utilizes lived experiences within her writing as a means to emphasize that education cannot fully encapsulate a period of time such as slavery. Therefore, I argue that as Butler has situated Kindred's characters as a response to the Black Power Movement, she has also established a relationship between education and experience and how those aspects fuel the main characters within the novel.

Committee: Julie Burrell (Advisor); Adrienne Gosselin (Committee Member); Frederick Karem (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

This dissertation examines how recent works of Black apocalyptic fiction represent the opportunities and limits of crisis as a driver of radical social change. Black apocalyptic fiction deals explicitly and substantively with what it means to be Black during, and in the aftermath of, apocalypse. It is a subset of the genre of Black speculative fiction, a broad category for texts by the African diaspora that resist purely realist or mimetic representation of the world and encompasses several genres, most commonly science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror. Black speculative fiction has garnered considerable academic interest in recent years and has been recognized as a rich site for analyzing race and racial differences in popular culture. This project joins the emerging critical conversation of scholars such as Isiah Lavender III, Ramon Saldivar, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen Barr, to analyze how Black writers engage with, challenge, and revise the conventions of the speculative genres. However, critical engagement with apocalypse in Black speculative fiction is still relatively sparse, as is scholarship addressing the representations of race and gender in Black apocalyptic fiction. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, I address this gap in current scholarship through a sustained consideration of Black apocalyptic fiction and the intersections of race and gender therein. This dissertation begins to answer the question of how race and gender impact the potential for radical change in the wake of extreme crisis. Literary representations of apocalypse provide one form of what Nnedi Okorafor calls “the distancing and associating effect” of science fiction. They depict familiar spaces made strange through the lens of total destruction. Apocalypse narratives have a long history and have served many functions over time, including articulation of societal anxieties, social critique, and utopian striving. Black apocalyptic fiction extends this (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Martin Ponce (Advisor); Lynn Itagaki (Committee Member); Brian McHale (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; African Literature; American Literature; Black History; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Literature; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This manuscript comparatively examines the production of speculative fiction by black women writers from Brazil, Jamaica, the United States and Canada. Examination of each text reveals the way in which black female subjectivity, African-based spiritual epistemology, and African diasporic spaces converge to create multiply liminal discourses, which are the counterhegemonic articulations of black agency—particularly through the use of African spiritual paradigms—in envisioning liberated futures. Multiply liminal discourse as an interpretive frame establishes the shared position of black female liminality and African epistemological frames of reference while remaining attendant to the particulars of difference generated by varied historical developments in African diasporic spaces. The examinations of the works within this text, utilizing multiply liminal discourse as an interpretive methodology, reveal the potential for enactment of “strategic essentialism” toward an integrated theoretical and practical liberatory discourse and politics. This occurs within the texts through reclaiming agency for black womanhood and black romantic relationships in Aline Franca's A Mulher de Aleduma; embracing African heritage particularly through one of the most demonized cultural legacies, African spirituality, in Erna Brodber's Louisiana and Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring; and the expansive and inclusive vision of liberation ideology that embraces difference and change through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. This manuscript concludes by discussing the integration of ideology and activism through multiply liminal discourse, the ways in which speculative fiction enables that integration and ultimate implications for black liberation.

Committee: Valerie Lee (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2009, English/Rhetoric and Writing

This study builds a theory or vocabulary that explains science fiction (SF) as a form of persuasion, called Heterotopian Rhetoric. This rhetoric utilizes a cognitively estranged scientific heterotopia (an other place: a utopia, eutopia, or dystopia) as a proof and appeal that persuasively demonstrates to dynaton, what is possible. The vocabulary of Heterotopian Rhetoric is built through the contextual re-vision and synthesis of SF critical theory, classic rhetoric, sophistic rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, and several relevant philosophical and scientific vocabularies. The use of a cognitively estranged scientific heterotopia (CESH) as a proof and an appeal is particularly useful when the rhetor/author wants to critique readers' hegemonies and privileged cognitive paradigms, especially those with which they identify. The CESH proof provides a psychological projection situated within the realm of potentiality that absorbs direct criticism and subverts the readers' defense mechanisms. Numerous feminist SF novels can be read as utilizing the CESH proof to critique and persuade their traditionally white, male audiences by “educating” their cognitive paradigms or “ways of seeing”. So after building the vocabulary of Heterotopian Rhetoric in chapters one through three, Chapter Four applies and exemplifies the vocabulary through a case study of Octavia E. Butler's Lilith's Brood trilogy. The study concludes by suggesting further study of Butler's Parables novels and their embedded Earthseed text as not only Heterotopian Rhetoric, but rhetorical theory.

Committee: Sue Carter Wood PhD (Committee Chair); William Armaline PhD (Committee Member); Kris Blair PhD (Committee Member); Thomas Wymer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Philosophy; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2013, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The tradition of African-American satire developed from within the African village, provided a creative model of uncensored rhetorical criticism from within the limited discursive terrains of antebellum slavery to well into today's African-American artists' often satiric descriptions of contemporary society. Evolved from the nineteenth-centuries first-person slave narrative, the impulse of the neo-slave narrative is two fold: (1) cultural (re) appropriation of the dominant mythology, to correct the plantation pastoral, which had really been out there since 1870 to the 20th century (e.g., Gone with the Wind and The Song of the South), thus to recapture the image of the plantation from the popular imagination laden with negative stereotypes; (2) assess the lasting cultural meaning of slavery, in spite of America's constantly changing social climate. For the neo-slave narratives of Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) and Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982), the social climate of the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, dominated by social division—punctuated by Black Nationalism's essentialism and state sanctioned reinforcement of social division the Moynihan Report – informs their unusual pairing of satire with the slave neo-narrative to examine black masculinity through the domestic narrative of the family. To differentiate and interpret the satiric perspective in Kindred and Oxherding Tale, it is through Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia, and carnival that establishes the critical focus of this thesis on the complex relationship between family and society, in their varying expressions of destabilizing patriarchal discourse and its concomitant-- Black Nationalist masculine authority.

Committee: Frederick Karem PhD (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard PhD (Committee Member); Adrienne Gosselin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, American Culture Studies

Donna Haraway has referred to Octavia Butler as a "theorist for cyborgs" and while much work has been done to critically analyze Butler's novels and short stories, there has been very little attention paid to her contributions as a theorist in her own right. Located at the intersection of postcolonial and cyborg theory, this study examines reason across Octavia Butler's oeuvre, which groups historically have been granted access to reason via dominant discourses, and how Butler's novels and short stories rework these discourses, creating an inclusive model of reason. The study examines the historical linkages between Christianity and reason which fueled nineteenth century colonial projects as well as examining the construction of people of color as irrational and Butler's postcolonial counter-discursive strategies in her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Examining power in patterns of communication and knowledge production, the study also analyzes how the development of the experimental life in Europe in the seventeenth century shut out members of socially marginalized groups of the discursive site of the laboratory. Butler's Xenogenesis and Patternist series, however, provide an example of networked communication that allows all participants to act as knowledge producers, granting women and people of color the ability to speak authoritatively. Finally, the study examines how Butler unites reason and religion in her Parable series to provide a grounded theoretical model to build these inclusive communication networks into the structure of a culture. The theory Butler proposes provides us with a working model that stresses the importance of education, critical thought, and community-building in order to create a more just world.

Committee: Radhika Gajjala (Advisor); Ellen Berry (Committee Member); Maisha Wester (Committee Member); Susan Brown (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American Literature; Black Studies; Gender; Gender Studies