La fantascienza di Octavia E. Butler. Violenza, corpo e debito
Keywords:
Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Post-humanism, Speculative Fiction, Black body, Otherness, Historical DebtSynopsis
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.
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