Octavia E. Butler's works of science fiction invite readers to consider the structures of power in society and to ask what it means to be human. Butler addresses social justice issues such as poverty, racism, and violence against women and connects the history of slavery in the United States with speculation on a biologically altered future world. The first section of this volume, "Materials," lists secondary sources and interviews with Butler and suggests texts that instructors might pair with her works. Essays in the second section, "Approaches," situate Butler in science fiction, modernism, and Afrofuturism and provide interdisciplinary approaches from political science, philosophy, art, and digital humanities. The contributors present strategies for teaching Butler in literature courses as well as courses designed for adult learners, preservice teachers, and students at historically black colleges and universities.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.

From the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower:After the near-extinction of humanity, a new kind of alien-human hybrid must come to terms with their identity -- before their powers destroy what is left of humankind. Since a nuclear war decimated the human population, the remaining humans began to rebuild their future by interbreeding with an alien race -- the Oankali -- who saved them from near-certain extinction. The Oankalis' greatest skill lies in the species' ability to constantly adapt and evolve, a process that is guided by their third sex, the ooloi, who are able to read and mutate genetic code. Now, for the first time in the humans' relationship with the Oankali, a human mother has given birth to an ooloi child: Jodahs. Throughout his childhood, Jodahs seemed to be a male human-alien hybrid. But when he reaches adolescence, Jodahs develops the ooloi abilities to shapeshift, manipulate DNA, cure and create disease, and more. Frightened and isolated, Jodahs must either come to terms with this new identity, learn to control new powers, and unite what's left of humankind -- or become the biggest threat to their survival.

Octavia E. Butler is widely recognized today as one of the most important figures in contemporary science fiction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short stories and major novel sequences Patternmaster, Xenogenesis and The Parables, this is the most comprehensive Companion to Butler scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · Cyborgs and the posthuman · Race and African American history · Afrofuturism · Gender and sexuality · New perspectives from Religious Studies, the Environmental Humanities and Disability Studies · New discoveries from the Butler archives at the Huntington Library The book includes a comprehensive bibliography of works by Butler and secondary scholarship on her work as well as an afterword by the novelist Tananarive Due.

Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted—and still wants—to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of "otherness" and questions what it means to be truly human.

Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels explores the ways in which Octavia Butler’s liminal protagonists undergo ritualized transformations while in exile from their home communities. During this process, they engage in psychological, physical, political, and social transitions through what Victor Turner and Makhail Bakhtin describe as carnivalesque identities. Using postcolonial, feminist, anti-capitalist, and African American theorists, Lin Knutson examines how Butler’s imagined genesis and history carry echoes of American history, slave history, debt slavery, and colonization.

This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.

Structurally innovative and culturally expansive, the works of Karen Tei Yamashita invite readers to rethink conventional paradigms of genres and national traditions. Her novels, plays, and other texts refashion forms like the immigrant tale, the postmodern novel, magical realism, apocalyptic literature, and the picaresque and suggest new transnational, hemispheric, and global frameworks for interpreting Asian American literature. Addressing courses in American studies, contemporary fiction, environmental humanities, and literary theory, the essays in this volume are written by undergraduate and graduate instructors from across the United States and around the globe. Part 1, "Materials," outlines Yamashita's novels and other texts, key works of criticism and theory, and resources for Asian American and Asian Brazilian literature and culture. Part 2, "Approaches," provides options for exploring Yamashita's works through teaching historical debates, outlining principles of environmental justice, mapping geographic boundaries to highlight power dynamics, and drawing personal connections to the texts. Additionally, an essay by Yamashita describes her own approaches to teaching creative writing.

This essential guide addresses the expanding, multifaceted role of college and university academic leaders. The new edition of the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans, one of the most important offerings to the academic community by the American Conference of Academic Deans, is written by and for academic leaders to address the expanding, multifaceted role of college and university administrators. Each chapter explores a topic related to how higher education leaders are influenced by national events, local partnerships, or on-campus collaborations. Among the topics covered are: • understanding educational policy at the national level • working with leaders from department heads to provosts • engaging with external partners • leading collaborative change at small colleges and universities • shifting toward student-centered campuses • making data-informed decisions • embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion • managing and balancing salaries • building effective leadership teams and mentoring future leaders • holding difficult conversations • returning to the faculty after leadership Providing helpful advice that can be studied in short chapters and inspiring content based on personal experience, the forty-three authors in this volume hold positions from department chairs to presidents at four-year and community colleges across the country. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic and amid calls for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, each chapter offers perceptive insights from experienced leaders who serve a broad range of institutional types.

This introductory text explores the lives of 100 Black women and their unique and meaningful legacies upon the history, society, and culture of the USA. Today, the names and remarkable achievements of Black women such as Maya Angelou, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are well known to many Americans. Yet throughout American history, many lesser-known Black women like them have made invaluable contributions to sports, science, the arts, medicine, politics, and civil rights. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who published the first newspaper written for and by African American women, championed the cause of women's suffrage. Matilda Sissieretta Jones, whose father was an enslaved person, toured Europe and performed at the White House in front of four different presidents as one of the great sopranos of her generation. Augusta Savage, overcoming racism and sexism, became one of the most celebrated sculptors in history. This book serves as an important reminder that the story of America cannot be told without the Black women who, with strength and determination, have always pushed America forward even when others held them back.