Octavia Butler's (R)evolutionary Movement for the Twenty-First Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5807699 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Morris (0000-0002-1754-8932, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 270-288 |
| Publication date | 2015-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Utopian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1045-991X • E-ISSN: 2154-9648 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/utopianstudies.26.2.0270 |
| OpenAlex | W2150108218 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
In the ruined landscape of twenty-first-century California, Lauren Olamina, the main character of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, founds a new religion, Earthseed. Earthseed deifies the cosmic pervasiveness of change with a simple statement: "God is Change." While several scholars have usefully explicated the religious origins and affective qualities of the Earthseed community, I argue that Earthseed goes further, challenging the 1990s utopian imagination to invent new modes of organization that can work within new social and material realities. As a religion, Earthseed aims at changing humanity as a whole species, a goal so large that it requires radically new models of social and political organizing. In the second novel, Olamina changes Earthseed from a local, sustainable community to a decentralized movement that parasitically draws energy from social ruin. In doing so, Earthseed offers a challenge to the utopian thinking of the 1990s: fidelity to utopian goals requires new methods that can allow a utopian movement to thrive even in the absence of the robust public sphere that supported revolutionary social movements of the 1960s
Aesthetics · Energy (signal processing) · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Fidelity · Humanity · Movement (music) · Political science · Politics · Social movement · Sociology · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |