Join Ayana Jamieson, adrienne maree brown, Walidah Imarisha, and me at the American Studies Association Conference in LA November 6-9 for Octavia Butler’s Wild Seeds: An Acorn Community Gathering!
As members of the Octavia Butler Legacy Network, we invite ASA participants to an Acorn community gathering and invocation in the spirit of Afrofuturist, MacArthur “Genius” Award winning author Octavia Butler’s visionary fiction. We are interested in creating a dynamic space for artists, activists, and academics that honor her legacy by shaping Change toward the alternate realities they wish to see.This session will be a participatory, pleasurable sensory experience as we undo the restrictive and often unproductive model of the traditional scholarly paper. Participants will be invited to engage in a voice-and-body centered strategy session that draws on the pleasure derived from holistic, intertextual readings of Butler’s fiction. Vehicles for desired relationships, chosen families, and interdependent communities are embedded in all of her work requiring symbiotic, radical engagements with the Sacred/Monstrous Other and a reevaluation of our own boundaries. Pleasure often transcends and disrupts the controlling images and rigid ways of being that exist in our world in favor of worlds that we can inhabit for fully whole. As an interdisciplinary incubator, this session invites those interested in exploring the pleasure and passion which drives their scholarship, activism, art, and cultural work in community with others while thinking through the ways in which Butler’s fiction provides opportunities to explore more embodied relationships to ourselves.