About the Book
An homage to the childhood genius of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Bringing to view a selection of Butler's unpublished writings and drawings, this book traces her fascination with human-alien symbiosis to her early empathy with horses and other marginalized creatures.
The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia
to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler's development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and
self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena. She persistently re-visited and revised her early writings on teenage angst, Martians, Westerns, and racial politics. In one way or another her supernatural characters defied the constraints of gender, race, and class with equine-inflected resilience.
In the spirit of Butler's passion for library research, this book is comprised of twenty-six short A-Z chapters, on vocabulary,
images, and themes central to her authorial formation. It is part childhood biography, art and literary analysis, and memoir. It interweaves the author's personal recollections with scholarly musings on
poetry, film, and literature inspired by Butler's encyclopedic reading habits and experiments with genre. Just as cross-species kinships are at the heart of her Afro-futurist, eco-feminist storytelling, Butler demonstrates that coming-of-age is an ongoing process and key to healing our damaged planet.
Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction A is for Alias B is for Bambi C is for Character D is for Dog E is for Equisetopsida F is for Flash G is for Ganymede H is for Horse I is for "I am" J is for Junie K is for Kapok L is for Lion Girl M is for Mother N is for Notebook O is for Ooloi P is for Public Library Q is for QWERTY R is for Rex McDonald S is for Sexy T is for TV Western U is for Utopia V is for Victorville W is for White Cloud X is for Xenogenesis Y is for Yearbook Z is for Zorro Appendix of Horses Works Cited
About the Author :
Chi-ming Yang is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in histories of race, empire, and East-West cultural exchanges. Her book, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England (2011), analyzed the early China-mania that overtook European consumers of literature and luxury goods. Over the past decade, her scholarship has explored the politics and aesthetics of chinoiserie, as well as
cross-species encounters in poetry and art. Her recent publications on blackness, abolition, and Atlantic slavery have appeared in Early American Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, British Art Studies, and The
Journal of the Walters Art Museum.
Review :
Octavia Butler's work on adaptation is as necessary now as it has ever been. This Octavian dictionary looks to Butler's childhood and young adult creativity as a source for the adaptive interspecies worlds and ways of being she created in her published fiction. May this book help us to look to the young outcast geniuses of today as leaders towards the change we must become.
This brilliant, playful, and beautifully executed study is the first to focus upon Octavia Butler's juvenilia, giving us a glimpse into the becoming of one of the most important science fiction writers of the 20th century. Moreover, Yang uses quotidian syllabary to move us through Butler's youthful archive, noting her practice of 'reading for life.' While this book does so much for Black study's work with Butler, it also makes a necessary intervention in the work of animal studies, returning us to the necessity of an interspecies perspective on living that has been active in Black Thought all along. In a word, this work is not to be missed and I am grateful for this bit of genius in this world at this moment.
What if everything you ever wrote or scribbled, since you were a child, ended up in an archive-and someone decided to explore? In this playful and moving book, Chi-ming Yang dives into the accidental archive of famed science fiction author Octavia E. Butler to consider how her childhood dreams played out in her mature writing. From animals to outer space, we play with a young Octavia. We need those childhood passions, we learn, to nurture everything we do thereafter.
A brilliant intertextual combination of deep archival research, critical theory, art criticism, and occasional, judicious, and quite moving dashes of autobiography. The book presents a wealth of Butler's juvenilia for the very first time and in a completely innovative way. What sets Yang's contribution apart is the compelling and ingenious manner in which she presents this archival material. Sculpted in the form of a set of encyclopedia entries, this is an immersive, beautifully-paced reading experience: an inimitable combination of poetic recitation, meta-archival cataloguing, and a skillfully sequestered narrative element that drives the reading experience forward.
A unique and personal engagement with Butler's life and legacy.
A lively book overflowing with insights, [Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse] is a must-read for Octavia Butler fans and a fine introduction for readers new to Butler and her work.
[Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse]*R show[s] us not only what a writer's archive can be but also what this kind of archive demands from its readers, visitors, and curious fans.
