• Goal of Earthseed is to go to space; “take root among the stars”
    • Lauren is questioned/mocked for her beliefs, and Butler doesn’t hesitate to show how it seems ridiculous
    • Why the stars?
      • Relates to colonization, slavery
      • Science fiction often discusses exploration, discovery, and colonization
        • Relates to time period: imperialism, empire
  • What does colonization look like from a non-European perspective?
    • Implied in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, how do people (specifically Europeans) react to colonization?
    • Utopia / dystopia / heterotopia
      • Heterotopia is a space where people can do things differently; alter reality, space, time, society, etc.
    • Afrofuturism: moving into a heterotopic space where people of color are in power, a new world where the power dynamic is different
  • Afrofuturists sometimes use technology in order to create these new spaces where people of color have power
    • Sun Ra used synthesizers, science fiction as a medium to imagine these worlds
      • Space is the Place takes place on a different planet, black people are able to live a better life
    • Relates to separatism, or reverse colonization, where marginalized people become de-marginalized through new worlds
  • Afrofuturists focus on the Atlantic slave trade
    • Leaving Africa was already “the apocalypse” and going into slavery was the dystopia
    • Going to a better place would therefore “fix” the dystopia
    • Some music and stories propose a world where the babies of pregnant slaves thrown overboard grow up underwater and thrive
  • Wants to challenge white history and colonization and prophesize a new future
  • How do histories of racism/slavery induce futures of power?

How to read Parable of the Sower

  • Comics are used to juxtapose pictures with text in a deliberate sequence to produce an aesthetic response
  • When the expectations of gutters, straight lines, etc are broken, some emotional response is meant to be elicited