Imagining otherness through the eyes of Octavia Butler:
Dystopian futures as cautionary ecological tales

Available only in Adobe Acrobat Version

Felicity Kelcourse
Christian Theological Seminary

Draft only: please do not cite without permission 

Introduction    

What does being poor, working class, female, African-American, dyslexic, too tall for a girl, an only child and paralytically shy have to do with moral imagination?  If you’re Octavia Butler, everything.   What does Octavia Butler’s moral imagination and ours have to do with ecology?  That’s what we’re here to discover.

As scholars we typically claim a method – mine is two-fold.  To honor the maverick spirit of Octavia Butler I’ve chosen two approaches that may be far from self-evident in this context.  On the “moral imagination” side my method is theological and incarnational, seeking “that of God” in another both like and unlike oneself.  The second is informed by depth psychology generally, which posits that we are always influenced by ideas and affective responses that are not entirely responsive to conscious thought.  More specifically I plan to rely on intersubjective theory with a bit of analytical psychology thrown in.  We form our sense of self and other phenomenologically within the fields formed by interacting subjectivities, even those of a reader and writer who have never met, one alive and one dead.  I hope to show you what Octavia Butler has taught me about “otherness” and the capacity to imagine, even to value, a life that is not one’s own.