La fantascienza di Octavia E. Butler. Violenza, corpo e debito

Authors

Serena Di Donna

Keywords:

Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Post-humanism, Speculative Fiction, Black body, Otherness, Historical Debt

Synopsis

 

UniorPress2.jpg

Publisher: UniorPress

Series: Postcolonial Matters

Pages: 120

Language: Italian

NBN: 

Abstract: This volume responds to the pressing imperative to re-examine the categories of humanity, futurity, and alterity in light of today’s entangles crises – ecological devastation, structural racism, and the epistemic unravelling of modern universalist frameworks. Through a close engagement with the work of Octavia E. Butler – a pioneer of African American speculative fiction – the book investigates the political, affective, and narrative dimensions through which science fiction interrogates race, gender, memory, and survival.

Focusing on three central texts – Kindred, the Xenogenesis trilogy, and Parable of the Sower – the study explores how Butler unsettles the epistemic and political frameworks through which the human and its survival are conventionally imagined, articulating fractured genealogies, hybrid bodies, and posthuman subjectivities. In conversation with the radical theoretical paradigms of Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Butler’s fiction emerges as a site of poetic, ethical, and political resistance.

Combining literary analysis with insights from Black philosophy, gender theory, posthumanism, and diasporic contemporary art, the volume proposes a critical re-articulation of survival – one that refuses autonomy, property, and identity as its foundations, and instead foregrounds interdependence, transformation, and instability. Butler’s narratives, populated by hybrids, mutations, irregular genealogies, and alien intelligences, prompt a profound rethinking of life, relationships, and memory, opening new possibilities beyond traditional Western humanist assumptions.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Serena Di Donna

Serena Di Donna was born in Torre del Greco, Naples, where she completed her classical and linguistic studies before continuing her academic studies at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. There, she completed both the first and second-level degrees in literature and cultural studies, focusing on contemporary fiction, post-colonial theory, and feminist thought.

Her early academic work explored the fiction of Nnedi Okorafor in relation to postcolonial identity and migration. Later, her research turned to the speculative worlds of Octavia E. Butler, through which she examined the intersections of Black studies, post-humanism, and cultural critique.

Serena’s work is driven by a deep interest in voices that challenge dominant narratives and imagine alternative futures. She approaches literature – particularly science fiction – as a space of radical possibility, where questions of identity, power, and transformation can be reimagined.

Downloads

Published

August 28, 2025

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about this monograph

ISBN-13 (15)

978-88-6719-335-6

Publication date (01)

2025-08-28

doi

10.6093/978-88-6719-335-6