Specifically, while earlier characters are shown to create opportunities and venues of agency through their bodies, in Shori, Butler posits a character whose existence is predicated on its blackness and discusses how that purposeful racial construction leads to freedom. Chapter four discusses Butler's final novel, Fledgling, and how the novel's protagonist, Shori not only fits into the matrix of Butler characters but represents the culmination of the privileging of black female physicality that I observe in the author's entire canon. I will focus on different aspects of that mother/daughter relationship in two series, the Patternist sequence, which includes, in chronological order, Wild Seed, Mind of my Mind and Patternmaster. Much like the aforementioned challenge to femininity vis-à-vis sexual morality, Octavia Butler often challenges and interrogates the traditional definition of motherhood, specifically, the relationship between mother and daughter. In chapter three, I move the discussion into an exploration of black motherhood. Specifically, I explore this subject using Harriet Jacobs' seminal autobiography and slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as the prism in which I historically focus the conversation. In this chapter, I explore one facet of Octavia Butler's narrative examination of sexual co-option and her subsequent implied challenge to definitions of feminine morality through the character Lilith who appears throughout Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. Chapter two addresses the way black women's femininity is judged: their sexual activity. This character is vitally important in discussing Butler's canon because she embodies the attributes and thematic issues that run throughout the author's work, specifically, the author's argument that black woman are provided opportunity through their bodies. The project is divided into five sections beginning with an intensive examination of Butler's ur-character, Anyanwu. Wild Seed and Lagoon, deploy the juxtaposition of traditional magical elements with science fictional materials, and the way the shapeshifting protagonists establish justice in society.Abstract This project argues that Octavia's Butler's construction of the black woman characters is unique within the pantheon of late eighties African-American writers primarily through Butler's celebration of black female physicality and the agency the black body provides. Editing WikipediaEvaluating WikipediaIllustrating Wikipedia Additional subject-specific guides. Furthermore, it explores effective sites of decolonization aiming at demonstrating “resistant” identities represented as an immortal shapeshifter in Wild Seed and an extraterrestrial in Lagoon. This study demonstrates how shapeshifting symbolically facilitates a process of decolonization by resisting and altering received constructions of gender and race. Shapeshifting is a narrative device in postcolonial science fiction that functions as a mode of resistance against colonialism, oppression and imperialism in different historical contexts in both novels. Indeed, science and knowledge are productive and shared among people. In both novels, the technology of the immortal shapeshifters does not threaten the nature/culture nor does it serve colonialism. From this position, this study explores the ways in which novelists, Octavia Butler, in Wild Seed, and Nnedi Okorafor, in Lagoon in particular, deploy shapeshifting, that is, the blurring and destabilization of boundaries, as a tool for aesthetic and socio-political engagement in postcolonial and post-independence narratives. In both science fiction novels, the conceptions of race and gender are highlighted through portrayals of shapeshifting and the post¬¬-human. This study examines shapeshifting as a post-colonial metaphor of race, gender and resistance in the novels Wild Seed and Lagoon.
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