Seeking final submissions for Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturistic Visions: Reframing Identity, Culture, and History. This edited collection is under contract with Lexington Books and slated for publication in 2020.

A founding voice of Afrofuturism, Octavia E. Butler challenged and reframed the hegemonic understandings of identity, history, and even territory in her fiction, employing a literary arsenal of aliens, mutants, vampires, time travelers, and new religions. This collection brings together essays specifically exploring Afrofuturist themes in Butler’s oeuvre, such as her unique approach to transculturation and her use of the generic conventions of science fiction to subvert Western humanist ways of considering and understanding the world.

The collection is organized in three sections: Biopolitics and Hybridity, Genetic Imperatives, and Apocalypticism and Futurity. We seek essays that will incorporate central themes from current Afrofuturist and Butler scholarship, including: biopolitics, defining the human, trauma studies, disability studies, ecocriticism, knowledge creation, power structures, distinguishing nature and culture, postcoloniality, the apocalypse in literature, as well as race and social critique in literature. We already have a number of essays on Lilith’s Brood (the Xenogenesis trilogy), the Parable books, and Fledgling, so we especially welcome essays on Seed to Harvest (the Patternmaster books) as well as Butler’s short fiction and unpublished work. We are most interested in work that will point to new directions and agendas in Butler studies, including her lasting legacy on the continually evolving directions of Afrofuturism.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words and a brief CV should be e-mailed to the editors, Lilith Acadia (Trinity College Dublin) and Ji Hyun Lee (Cornell University) at oebutlerbook@gmail.com as Microsoft Word documents no later than August 15, 2019. The press strongly prefers that contributors have PhDs in hand by the time we go to press. Invitations for full papers will be sent by August 31, 2019; initial drafts (5,000 to 8,000 words) are expected by October 15, 2019; final drafts will be needed by December 1, 2019.