Diversity, Change, Violence: Octavia Butler's Pedagogical Philosophy

Abstract

Octavia Butler's novels offer a compelling exploration of the connection between violence and pedagogy. He fiction presents characters in a violent world consistently encountering dramatic challenges in cultural and bodily identity as they form new and strange family groups. Repeatedly, Butler imagines a seeming utopia whose hidden stagnation is suddenly ripped open by the violence of change. Her characters are constantly forced to learn and teach in order to adapt. Her worldview in this regard emerges from of the idea that the process of encountering difference and allowing yourself to change in response to it is a much more violating experience than we often sentimentalize it to be. However, Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and the Parable duo exemplify how Butler's progressive retelling of the relationship linking diversity, change, and intellectual growth with inevitable violence offers, despite its relentless and pragmatic pessimism, a space for a pedagogical vision of practical and embodied community to overcome the barriers that divide us.