The stars as the only refuge from settler colonialism: Alaia Snell, ‘Space/Race: Octavia E. Butler, Off-Earth Futures, and Life Beyond Settlerism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The stars as the only refuge from settler colonialism: Alaia Snell, ‘Space/Race: Octavia E. Butler, Off-Earth Futures, and Life Beyond Settlerism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2024

02Nov24

Abstract: Sketching possibilities for planetary futurity, the first pages of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) unveil an illusive dreamscape where earthly remembrance and intercosmic imagination merge. Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is “learning to fly” as she sleeps, but drifting further from the safety of her imagined doorway, she becomes engulfed by flames (4). “[G]rabbing handfuls of air and fire” as she “kick[s]” to safety, Lauren’s reverie exposes a climatic anxiety that inundates her subconscious (4). Lauren obtains respite once she “fade[s] into the second part of the dream” she describes “as ordinary and real,” a memory from years ago (4). The incinerated environment becomes illuminated by stars whose “cool, pale, glinting light” offers cosmic shelter from the heat of the day (5). Figuring stars and celestial bodies as evocations of distinct memories, Lauren’s dream echoes throughout Sower as a representation of astronomical potentiality. Her reverie, unearthed in a half-conscious state, serves to inspire otherworldly and emphatically material hope of survivance amidst Earth’s collapse, as “life alone is enough” to invite promise for remote planets free from ecological disruption (83). By presenting the stars as a common space distant from the violent environs of a burning dreamscape, Sower invites readings where potential life-worlds are corporeal sanctuaries compared to the blaze violently spreading in her dream, in her community, and on Earth. Lauren’s imagining within a dire future lends itself to a spatial intimacy where the stars, in their vast remoteness, are also a tangible source of refuge.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed