Dystopia, Speculation, and the Transhuman: Octavia Butler

This course will examine the work of science fiction writer, Octavia Butler. Critically engaging her novels and short stories, we will discover and work through a series of themes and tropes - dys(u)topia, the transhuman, temporality, the apocalyptic, survival, and hierarchical thinking as the root of racism and sexism. We will ask questions in this course about the relationship between sci-fi, speculative fiction, and the imagination of the present. In addition, Butler's fiction, which imagines various forms of miscegenation and interspecial contact, will invite us to deconstruct and re-imagine the figure of the human.