Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires

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Lexington Books, Oct 14, 2010 - Literary Criticism - 200 pages
Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires is a timely text that critically situates Butler's fiction in several fields of study including American, African-American, gender, and science fiction studies. This book attempts to avoid excluding as many readers as possible by evading esoteric jargon while still engaging the interdisciplinary discourses that respond to Butler's fiction. The study asserts that Butler's fiction transforms the way the body is imagined with reference to race and gender. This text examines how Butler's fiction is able to cross several genre boundaries while simultaneously reshaping the genre of science fiction. This book makes the claim that Butler's fiction is crucial for contemporary and future investigations of identity formation. Discussions of race, class, and sex are reoccurring topic that are inextricable to any understanding of body politics and theory. This book is filled with exciting and insightful discussions that raise questions about what constitutes humanity in Butler's fiction and in the real world. Ultimately, the purpose of the text is to add to the scholarship surrounding Butler and to bring her to the attention of audiences that might otherwise overlook her work. This book is an invitation for readers inside and outside of the academy to discover the fiction of Octavia Butler.
 

Contents

History Revision and Rememory of Bodies
1
The Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions
25
Hierarchies of Identity
47
Octavia Butler Wole Soyinka and WEB Du Bois
67
Butlers Changing God
83
Chapter 6 Migration of the Hybrid Body
99
Reading Racial and Gender Politics in the Fiction of Octavia Butler
115
Vast Frontiers
129
On the Phone with Octavia Butler October 2002
133
Butler Barnes Due and Hopkinson
135
Bibliography
147
Index
155
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About the author (2010)

Gregory Jerome Hampton is associate professor of African American literature at Howard University.

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