Remembering the Past, Acknowledging the Present, and Imagining the Future

A Differential Vision for Black Americans

By Sydney Fisher

Introduction

Afrofuturism is a conceptual framework that emerged during a time when technoculture and people of color were treated as mutually exclusive entities. Combining African diasporic histories with contemporary racial inequalities and placing them into futuristic contexts is the essence of Afrofuturist literature. Octavia Butler achieves this in her works Dawn and Parable of the Sower. Butler artfully combines the real with the fantastic in order to imagine a future in which Black Americans not only exist, but lead, survive, excel; yet this is not done with a dismissal of contemporary struggles. Rather, Butler uses the space of science fiction (a genre that has historically been inhabited by mostly white male authors) to draw attention to modern racial inequalities, while still imagining a future that highlights the resiliency of oppressed peoples. Butler’s Afrofuturist works, Dawn and Parable of the Sower specifically, can be connected to Karma R. Chávez’s concept of ‘differential visions’ in that they, quoting Patricia Cormack, “occupy a space where practical actions and utopian dreams coincide” (Chávez, 26). As is demonstrated by Octavia Butler’s works, science and speculative fiction become locations of tangible power dynamics and allow oppressed peoples to see themselves occupy futures that they have historically been denied, while simultaneously acknowledging the conditions of the world that contributed to their oppression in the first place. Thus, a vision of a better future cannot be achieved without first identifying the obstacles in the way of this vision.

Afrofuturism

To begin to understand how Butler employs theory in Dawn and Parable of the Sower, and why this holds significant power, it is important to understand the concept of Afrofuturism and one of its literary theory predecessors. Afrofuturism serves to engage “the intersections between race and technology” (Leitch, 2631), and can be connected to certain components in Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism. In Said’s analysis of the ‘Orient’ (or ‘the East’ as it was understood–and, in effect, created–by Westerners) and the ‘Occident’ (or, ‘the West,’ defined by its difference from ‘the East’) he also uncovers that “literary, philological, and critical texts are always ‘in the world’ and have social resonances” (Leitch, 1781). Said explains that “being a White Man...was a very concrete manner of being in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought” (Said, 58). The saturation of science fiction with stories of white characters encountering technological and futuristic scenarios has real-world implications and directly illustrates who has power, as power “functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures” (Eshun, 289). The emergence of Black authors in science fiction and other Afrofuturist texts is nothing short of political action, which Said’s work in Orientalism illustrates with its discussion of power: “There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces” (Said, 1799). From the above quotation, one can see how multifaceted the formation of power is; speculative fiction with Afrofuturist overtones can influence “canons of taste and value” (Said, 1799). Said’s concept of Orientalism helps ground our understanding of Afrofuturist works in that these works have material power. The ideas expressed in Butler’s novels are a reflection of extant cultural issues.

Butler’s novels are a reflection of extant cultural issues. In an interview conducted in 1988, Butler spoke of how delicate the process of storytelling is when one wants readers to take away significant political messages. She explains that “fiction writers can’t be too pedagogical or too polemical” (McCaffery, 25), lest they want readers to lose interest in the story and put it down. This gives fiction writers a unique challenge, but also a unique opportunity; readers who engage with the narrative will also be exposed to the underlying political message of the text. Of course, Afrofuturism is about much more than the transmission of politicized messages to readers. Alondra Nelson, one of Afrofuturism’s notable scholars, builds off of Said’s analysis of power structures at work in literature. Said identifies that an aspect of the electronic and postmodern world is “a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed” (Said, 1804), in this case, how Black Americans are viewed. Denying the space of science fiction to Black authors and readers runs the risk of reproducing the same, tired stereotypes of Black people borne out of a dark history of slavery and segregation in the United States, and Afrofuturism addresses this with its imagining of new futures–– futures that do not erase, but transcend, these histories. However, as Nelson illustrates, the electronic age is not free from danger, and neither are the futures Butler imagines. This is because “the social conditions produced by the new information order have much in common with those that shaped the old industrial order” (Nelson, 2633). Similarly, in Kodwo Eshun’s Further Considerations on Afrofuturism he states that “ongoing disputes over reparation indicate that [racial] traumas continue to shape the contemporary era” (Eshun, 288). There is certainly a need for Black authors to inhabit science fiction if for nothing else but to insist that Black people will make it to the future after experiencing some of the most devastating diasporic trauma known to humankind. Our understanding of Afrofuturist literature is incomplete without acknowledging that the science fiction genre itself should be inhabited by Black Americans, arguably more than any other group. Nelson asks, “was there ever anyone more ‘alien’ than the Black men and women abducted from Africa and brought to the New World against their will? Wasn’t the history of Black Americans a ‘sci-fi nightmare’ in which the tools of the future were continually turned against Black people?” (Nelson, 2636). Further illustrating this, Eshun states that “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same” (Eshun, 298). Taking all of this into consideration, we can begin to see how Butler expertly dances between the contemporary and the futuristic to highlight the historical American Black experience while still paving the way for the future, and this dance is a political one. In the same 1988 interview previously mentioned, Butler explains that she aims to write “about a world that seems a bit like the one [she] inhabit[s]” (McCaffery, 25). She scoffs at the idea of pure utopias, as the existence of flawless humans is highly unlikely; yet this does not negate the necessity of imagining racially diverse futures. 8 DAWN It is with the analysis of these concepts that we can begin to understand the importance of the vision Butler achieves in her Afrofuturist works Dawn and Parable of the Sower. In the article “Pessimistic Futurism: Survival and Reproduction in Octavia Butler’s Dawn,” Justin Mann points to the symmetry between Butler’s novel and the conditions of the real world at the time. Mann points to “Reagan-era debates about security and survival” (Mann, 62) and their relation to the prospect of nuclear war as inspiration for Lilith’s characterization. Butler explained that she felt there must be “something genetically wrong with us” (Mann, 63) if we assume nuclear war could be beneficial for anyone. Inspired by these real-world events, Butler established Lilith as a resilient character who was “able to combat [the] suicidal tendencies” (Mann, 62) humanity was faced with. The connection between the real world and the imagined futuristic one in Dawn is furthered by Lilith facing incredible challenges that mirror contemporary racial inequalities. This is perhaps most poignantly exemplified in the character of Curt, who had been a New York cop before ending up on the Oankali ship 250 years after Earth’s near annihilation. Curt’s racist attitudes toward Joseph regularly come up in the novel. Hearing Joseph’s accent, he “turned to stare, then to glare at him” (Butler, 141). Joseph’s race (and perceived homosexuality) are regularly questioned and judged by other humans under Lilith’s watch, mainly Curt. This deep-seeded bigotry ultimately results in Joseph being “hacked to death by Curt” (Butler, 224). While this may have been because he saw Joseph’s flesh healing quickly (due to the Oankali’s alterations of Joseph’s DNA) and was frightened by this, it more so shows Curt’s fear of difference, which is the root of racism. Curt’s previous occupation as a police officer is also not to be ignored. He once told Lilith, “As they pulled two struggling, bleeding men apart... she might have made a pretty good cop” (Butler, 145). This comment holds extreme weight considering the history of police brutality against Black Americans and exemplifies Curt’s ignorance regarding this history. Despite being in a “limiting situation, Lilith consistently chooses survival over selfabnegation, retreat or forfeit” (Mann, 63). Dawn, taking place 250 years in the future, still acknowledges African diasporic histories to show that these histories will not prevent Black Americans from having a place in the future. This future is not presented by Butler in an optimistic way, rather with “a doubtful, yet stalwart, posture” (Mann, 73). This posture helps to usher in the possibility of a new world order without erasing the conditions that preceded it.

Parable of The Sower

Butler approaches the future similarly in Parable of the Sower. The story is full of details that read as if they are non-fiction, truly capturing modern-day inequalities while still wrapping them up in a futuristic bow. Like in Dawn, Butler (through her characterization of Lauren in Parable) establishes a skeptical and critical attitude towards police officers, again mirroring contemporary issues. Lauren explains that in her community, the police “never helped when people called for help... and more often than not, made a bad situation worse” (Butler, 114). She also describes them as thieves, seeing a badge as nothing but “a license to steal” (Butler, 316). The conditions in which Lauren and her community members live also mirror modern-day inequalities when it comes to housing. 9 While Lauren’s community is home to people of varying races, her admission that members of her community “hear gunfire so much that [they] don’t hear it” (Butler, 50) can be likened to the conditions faced by many minority communities today. According to the Office of Policy Development and Research, “racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected” by neighborhood violence (Sackett). This violence is shown in more ways than frequently heard gunshots, and most of it occurs outside the walls of Lauren’s community. Lauren expresses that “on the street, people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind” (Butler, 36). This attitude manifests itself into Lauren’s fears that “a racist challenge might force [her group] apart” (Butler, 178), and the preoccupation that her group of racially diverse survivors may be in danger outside the walls, as “mixed couples catch hell” (Butler, 172). The violence faced by Lauren and her community members resembles modern-day violence experienced by minorities, but this does not prevent Butler from speculating about the future in which Black Americans overcome these conditions. Beyond referencing contemporary issues, Butler also calls back to African diasporic histories in Parable of the Sower, while still exploring her futuristic vision. When word spreads about the creation of a new company town called Olivar, some people in Lauren’s community are intrigued by the opportunity to perhaps have a better life and access to steady jobs. Lauren, however, sees it as an example of “debt slavery” (Butler, 121), calling back to “early American company towns in which the companies cheated and abused people” (Butler, 119), mainly minorities who had few options regarding employment. While some of Butler’s references to African diasporic histories are more negative, like her reference to debt slavery, she also incorporates more positive examples of resiliency, which is also a hallmark of the African diaspora. When Lauren meets Bankole, she notes that their “last names were an instant bond between [them]” (Butler, 230), because it was evidence that they were the descendants of “men who assumed African surnames back during the 1960s” (Butler, 230). This detail serves to show the resilience among Black people throughout their history that was riddled with oppression. Lauren and Bankole are building off the resilience of their ancestors simply by existing in a world that has been hell-bent on their continued oppression, illustrating once again how Butler paves the way for a future without ignoring the past. Parable of the Sower, in perhaps its most apt Afrofuturist strategy, recognizes the clash between the old and the new, the lived and the imagined, by questioning and then affirming the legitimacy of space travel. Lauren, in a way, becomes a metaphor for Afrofuturist literature by supporting space exploration and the seeking out of new worlds while still recognizing how this futuristic dream feels unimportant–even offensive–to some. She ruminates on the opposing view, understanding that many see it as “money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter” (Butler, 17). Despite her acknowledgement of the resistant attitude held by many of her community members towards space travel, she knows that “space exploration and colonization are among the few things left... that can help us more than they hurt us” (Butler, 20), because it is in the creation of new 10 (Butler, 20), because it is in the creation of new worlds that Black Americans can imagine a resilient future. It is this clash between modernity and stagnation that truly exemplifies Butler’s masterful work in Afrofuturist literature and speculative fiction. Despite Butler’s acknowledgement of historical and contemporary inequalities, she creates Black characters who transcend these things and find ways to be resilient, which again cements the idea previously considered that “Black existence and science fiction are one and the same” (Eshun, 298).

Pessimistic Futurism

According to Samuel R. Delaney, another notable Afrofuturist author, science fiction is about creating “a significant distortion of the present” (Eshun, 290). The genre does not seek to imagine futures that couldn’t possibly come to pass. Rather, the genre uses contemporary cultural issues to imagine what futures could come to pass. This idea can be connected to another concept from Justin Mann’s Pessimistic Futurism: Survival and Reproduction in Octavia Butler’s Dawn. Mann argues that Butler employs ‘pessimistic futurism,’ which “couches the prospects of tomorrow in the uncertainties conditioned by the past and present” (Mann, 62). Butler’s pursuit of the future does not negate the importance of acknowledging how the past and the present created this future. In Mann’s words, pessimistic futurism “never relinquishes its bases in the distinct fact of racial oppression” (Mann, 66). At the same time, Butler’s futures allow Black characters to seek alternate destinies than those lived by their ancestors. Afrofuturism encourages “radical world-making” (Mann, 65), borrowing facets of the past and the present and speculating about what could happen, thus exercising political power by imagining a future that sees Black people as resilient leaders––not defined by their diasporic histories, but emboldened by them..

Afrofuturism Connection to ‘Differential Visions’

Now that some of the Afrofuturist elements of Butler’s Dawn and Parable of the Sower have been explored, we can begin to see how these elements can be applied to Karma R. Chávez’s concept of ‘differential visions.’ Borrowing from “Chela Sandoval’s differential consciousness, or a personal and strategic maneuvering to resist hegemony, and Aime Carrillo Rowe’s differential belonging, which involves the pursuit of interpersonal alliances” (Sowards, 179), Chávez explains that ‘differential visions’ represent gray politics that are coalitional, boundary-resistant, and committed to preventing the reification of “marginalizing hierarchies” (Sowards, 179).Chávez points to queer migration manifestos as embodying this differential vision, but Butler’s work achieves this as well. Manifestos promote coalitional strategies by legitimizing political belongings that “shift among and between liberal/inclusionary, progressive, radical, and utopian political perspectives” (Chávez, 23). As such, a sort of “gray politics” (Chávez, 29) is achieved, which embodies a differential vision. Further, Chávez asserts that static political orientations “imply a progress narrative, with people being expected to move from point to point” (Chávez, 29). The world is vastly more complicated than this, with progress itself being a component of Western-leaning ideologies. Much of this progress has been at the expense of minorities. Progress narratives also imply that our belonging in oppressed groups is fixed, whereas “differential belonging asks people to acknowledge how ‘we are oppressed and privileged’” (Chávez, 27). 11 Butler’s Afrofuturist works achieve a differential vision, much like queer migration manifestos, because they do not shy away from nuance and gray spaces. Butler confronts historical and contemporary inequalities and how these inequalities influence imagined futures (such as when Joseph faces racism in Dawn, or when Lauren worries about her diverse group of survivors and how they will be perceived in Parable of the Sower), but ultimately shows that our being oppressed or privileged is constantly shifting, and that the best way to combat hegemonic power systems is to foster a coalitional political orientation--one that sees beyond difference.

Conclusion

While Afrofuturism is often concerned with celebrating the resiliency of Black people, it “is by no means naively celebratory” (Eshun, 29). The imagining of Black existence in diverse futures is not meant to dismiss contemporary struggles and violent histories, rather to highlight them – but also to refuse to be defined by them. In the words of Alondra Nelson, “the future is neither an uncritical embrace of the past nor a singular conception of what lies ahead. It’s ours for the imagining” (Nelson, 2638). By ‘ours’ here, she means Black Americans, who have historically been denied the right to imagine futures of their own in which their destinies are differential and not shrouded in even more oppression. We know from Edward Said’s work in Orientalism that occupying space in literary works is a political and powerful act that has material effects. We must take all that we can from speculative and Afrofuturist works of fiction, like Butler’s Dawn and Parable of the Sower, so that we can transcend the harmful effects of limiting futures and pursue a differential vision. We must “embrace diversity or be destroyed”

Works Cited

Chávez, Karma R. “The Differential Visions of Queer Migration Manifestos.” Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, University of Illinois Press, 2013, pp. 21-37.

Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, pp. 287–302. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41949397. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.

Leitch, Vincent B., et al. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Mann, Justin L. “Pessimistic Futurism: Survival and Reproduction in Octavia Butler’s Dawn.” Northwestern Scholars, SAGE Publications Ltd, 1 Apr. 2018, www. scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/ pessimistic-futurism-survival-andreproduction-in-octavia-butlers.

McCaffery, Larry, and Jim McMenamin. “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” Conversations with Octavia Butler, edited by Conseula Francis, by Octavia E. Butler, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, pp. 10–26.

Nelson, Alondra. “Afrofuturism: Past-Future Visions.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2000, pp. 2631– 2638.

Sackett, Chase. “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: HUD USER.” Neighborhoods and Violent Crime | HUD USER, 2016,

Said, Edward. “Orientalism.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, by Vincent B. Leitch et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 1978, pp. 1780–1805.

Sowards, Stacey K. “Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, vol. 1, no. 3, Michigan State University Press, 2014, pp. 178–81, https:// doi.org/10.14321/qed.1.3.0178.