Futurity as Practice: Postcards from the Octavia E. Butler Conference at The Huntington

By Ed Chang, Ph.D.

Pasadena is a weird place.  The Huntington is a weird place.  I had never been to either place until my recent visit to attend the “Futurity as Praxis: Learning from Octavia E. Butler” conference on May 23 & 24, 2024.  Butler was born in and grew up in Pasadena, the sights, sounds, and experiences of which inform and embedded in much of her writing and worldbuilding.  Much of the conference and the discussions of Butler’s life, stories, and legacy was framed by Pasadena as a place, a complicated and often contradictory space particularly regarding race, gender, and especially class.  The conference brought together writers, artists, scholars, activists, community members, and fans to explore and expand the “lessons” and pedagogies of Butler’s work especially in the contemporary moment.  The conference description read: 

The year 2024 marks the beginning of the critical dystopian future Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) envisioned in her groundbreaking novel Parable of the Sower. Her fiction and the story of her life compel us to reckon with power, leadership, creativity, the Earth, human relationships, and the unknown possibilities that await us in the stars. Now, intellectuals from different communities will gather to contemplate her legacy. This conference asks how we have learned from Butler’s writing and what her archive at The Huntington—a short distance from where the author spent her formative years in Pasadena, California—can help future generations discover.

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Day One

My flight was delayed into Burbank airport (also a weird place), so I ended up missing the welcome plenary.  However, I did make it in time for the first session “Creativity as Praxis,” which featured Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, a queer & trans anti-disciplinary artist and writer from the Departments of Dance and Black Study at UC Riverside; Damian Duffy, author of the graphic novel adaptations of Kindred and Parable of the Sower; and the esteemed Steven Barnes, a Black author of over thirty novels of science fiction, horror, and suspense.  

Whitson’s offered questions and commentary about Octavia Butler’s creativity, writerly process, and imaginative practice, thinking about the work of Black artists and Black embodiment, about what it means to live with and write about ghosts (literary, historical, personal), and what it means to write for different audiences, different purposes.  Duffy talked about the possibilities and pitfalls of adapting Butler’s texts into graphic novel from, about working with Butler’s stories and legacy as a white writer and his creative partnership with illustrator John Jennings, and about the forthcoming adaptation of Parable of the Talents.  Steven Barnes rounded out the conversation with anecdotes from his friendship with Butler and how to live, create, promote, sell, and survive as a writer or artist (particularly as writer or artist of color).  Barnes spoke earnestly and authentically about what it means to be a Black writer for white audiences and simultaneously as a role model for Black communities, particularly for young people.  

In the afternoon was Session Two titled “The Books of the Living: Collection Researchers.”  It featured moderator Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, a digital humanist, author of Imagine Lagos, and Assistant Professor of History at UC Riverside; Ayana Jamieson, educator, mythologist, and founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network; Alyssa Collins, Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and 2021-22 Octavia E. Butler Fellow at The Huntington; and Lois Rosson, Berggruen Institute Fellow and 2023-24 Octavia E. Butler Fellow at The Huntington.  

The table focused on the Butler archive at The Huntington, how folks have worked with Butler’s papers, and how different disciplines could benefit from reading Butler’s writing and the questions, problems, and potential solutions it raises.  Adelusi-Adeluyi asked the panel questions about the touch and feel and presence of Butler’s papers, the ethics of “intruding” into the archive, and how Butler herself did research, take notes, make connections, and integrate research into her stories.  Jamieson talked about Butler in relation to psychology, mythology, but also Butler and everyday things, everyday realities.  Collins and Rosson described their firsthand work in the archives, in the happy accidents of finding something that they did not expect to find, and how they can use their research in their home disciplines but also in interdisciplinary ways.  

Day Two

The morning session, Session Three, of the second day was called “Mind of My Mind: Scholarship and Pedagogy” and brought together scholars, writers, researchers, and teachers to think about Butler in the classroom: what is taught, how is Butler taught, what challenges come up, and why Butler is important?  The panel was a full slate with Jasmin Young, who moderated and is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside and co-editor of Black Power Encyclopedia, as moderator; Gerry Canavan, Professor of English at Marquette University and author of Octavia E. Butler (Modern Masters of Science Fiction); Ashanté Reese, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at University of Texas at Austin and author of Black Food Geographies; Marisa Parham, Professor of English and Digital Studies and director of the African American Digital Humanities initiative at University of Maryland; and Valorie Thomas, who is an author, consultant, and Emerita Professor of English at Pomona College.  

Like the previous day’s sessions, the panel had a lot to share, a lot to offer regarding teaching and writing about Octavia Butler.  In response to the question about challenges in teaching Butler, Canavan addressed how many of the novels and stories are quite dark, intense, and students are often confronted by difficult topics and situations; Parham considered the ways that Butler, her archive, and the ways different students can use their disciplines to think about their own knowledge production.  When asked about the radical possibilities of Butler, Reese talked about Butler and social justice education, politics, and activism and taking Butler outside of the classroom; Thomas added Butler’s connections to the “canon” of African American literature, to figures like Phyllis Wheatley, and Butler’s place in Afrofuturism and the stakes of Black futurity.  Other topics that came up during the conversation included having students write adaptations or their own versions of Butler’s stories to process their own ideas and issues, thinking about Butler and abolition or Butler and geography, especially considering how many places use the name “Earthseed,” and finally, how to get students to read with nuance, complexity, history, media and technology, and even popular culture. 

The last session of the conference was in the afternoon on Friday.  “Earthseed: Sustainability & Activism” brought together Elyse Ambrose, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Department at UC Riverside and the moderator; Syrus Marcus Ware, an artist, activist, member of the Performance Disability Art Collective, co-editor of Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada; and an Assistant Profess of the School of Arts at McMaster University; and Rasheedah Phillips, is an attorney, housing advocate, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, and author of The Recurrence Plot.  

Ambrose framed the panel’s conversation around three main ideas: first, what are your values, beliefs regarding activism, sustainability, and community, and who are your “people,” to whom do you feel accountable; second, how does your work relate to time and temporality given that “Earthseed” as imagined in the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents is “worlding toward a world one will never see,” how do we think about queering temporality; and third, how do you/we live and thrive despite the constraints of Western time and reality?  Ware talked about their own identities, about working as and with trans, queer, disabled, BIPOC communities, about abolition, responding to conflict and crisis, and about the need for disability justice and trans justice.  Phillips shared her experiences in Philadelphia, being a young mother, of being told that she had no future, how we might imagine “Black quantum futurism” and “Black times” and “Afrodiasporan time,” and the importance of centering the people most impacted by the world’s problems.  All of the presenters focused on getting out of crisis, thinking long term, thinking generationally, and what it means to imagine different possibilities, solutions, and hope.  

Lessons Learned

2024 is a weird.  The twenty-first century is weird.  And as many of the presenters noted over the two days, we are in the year that begins Butler’s Parable of the Sower.  We are living through the prescient, dystopian world that Lauren Olamina, the narrator and main character of the novel, is living through.  Climate change.  Environmental disaster.  Economic crisis.  Fires.  Failing governments and social structures.  Disability.  Violence.  War.  White nationalism.  Death.  But all of the presenters also tried to articulate ways to change, transform, and survive.  Unfortunately, Butler herself was not able to bring the trilogy to a hopeful close; it is said that she put the series down to think about how to finish the last novel Parable of the Trickster, but she unexpectedly died in 2006 before she could complete it.  In a deep way, everyone that attended the conference, everyone that presented or organized, and everyone that has engaged Butler is continuing her work, her passion, her dreams even in a tiny puzzle-piece way.  

I think that is the biggest lesson of the conference—many hands and hearts make light work but also literally make survival possible, particularly for those most vulnerable or marginalized.  I regularly teach Butler’s texts in my classes wherever and whenever possible, and students always find her stories and novels rich, troubling, and energizing.  I am reminded of an essay I wrote called “Drawing the Oankali: Imagining Race, Gender, and the Posthuman in Butler’s Dawn,” which was published in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia Butler edited by Tarshia Stanley.  I wrote about students drawing the aliens in Dawn and their responses to the novel’s main ideas and challenges.  What they learned, what they reported remind me of the discussions and elucidations offered by conference goers and presenters:

What the students imagine, what the students encounter in the text, and what the students reflect on and respond to may not always be easy, tidy, or necessarily hopeful. Dawn and Butler's other worlds are always dystopian and utopian…Butler's stories and worlds do not shy away from exploring these difficult questions and posing difficult answers.  It is these acts of imagining new, different, radical possibilities that are at the heart of reading Dawn, teaching Butler, and making drawings of aliens. (88)

I really appreciated everyone’s curiosity, openness, and compassion.  I think these are the things we need to catalyze and embolden in 2024 and beyond.  They are the antidone to so much of the fear and destruction of the current world.  Even though we were talking and thinking about heavy, heavy things, there was always humor, laughter, play, and joy in the mix.  I really loved seeing and feeling that part, too.  I think one of my favorite moments of all the conference was during the morning session on Day Two when Valorie Thomas revealed that Butler loved horses.  Butler was a horse girl.  It was a side of Butler that I had not encountered, and it made me so happy.  It made the whole room happy.  

I am thankful that I got to attend and witness so many great moments.  Truth be told, I found out about the conference only a week or so before the event dates, and I decided on a lark to make the trip.  I wanted to visit The Huntington, particularly to find out a little more about the archive and their fellowship opportunities, and I wanted to see and meet some of the speakers listed in the program.  Given that I am a member of the executive board of The Octavia E. Butler Literary Society, I felt like there needed to be representation at the conference.  I am glad I went even though I had no idea what to expect.  In my head, as an academic, I thought it was going to be more along the lines of conferences I usually attend.  It ended up being a bigger audience and a more mixed audience than I had imagined, all of us in one theater to watch and listen to each session.  I wanted more opportunity to interact with folks, to socialize, to talk after each session.  I am glad that I paid for the lunches each day because it was the only real chance to sit, meet, and get to know others.  Overall, I had a wonderful time at the conference, wandering around The Huntington, and getting to see a little bit of the city of Pasadena.  (I had some good food, bought some seven-sided dice at Odyssey Games, and had a few drinks at The Boulevard, Pasadena’s only gay bar.)  I was not able to see the actual archives though; I wish there had been an option to take a tour.  But I intend to return.  I hope the conference runs again, and next time, I would love to be one of the people on the stage.  I look forward to following up on all of the amazing speakers, thinkers, and creators I saw and met; I am excited by the art and work and organizing that everyone is doing.  

A big thanks to the organizers, staff, and presenters.  A big thanks to the attendees and to the venue.  And, finally, a big happy birthday wish to Octavia E. Butler!  ​