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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
In Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89) aliens seek to interbreed with the survivors of a nuclear war to remove a conflict between humanity's genetic traits: intelligence and hierarchical thinking. Extant criticism shows Xenogenesis contributing to debates about race and identity politics. Race does not evaporate upon contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence; rather, race persists not in a sense that makes Xenogenesis a neo-slave narrative, but in other participations in the African-American literary tradition and assertions of black cultural heritage. Gender also persists upon contact with Butler's aliens. Xenogenesis does not theorize gender as an essentialism; rather, it ascribes behaviour to genetics in order to critique hierarchical thinking.
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Anything to do with Humans always seems to involve contradictions.
Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy--Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), Imago (1989) (1)--is set approximately two hundred and fifty years after a nuclear war on Earth. An alien race known as the Oankali has retrieved human survivors for the purpose of breeding with them, thereby providing the aliens with the human genetic information that they value, and eliminating what they call 'the human contradiction' (Rites, p. 442), humanity's 'lethal' combination of 'mismatched genetic characteristics': intelligence and hierarchical thinking. The latter trait, which humanity shares with other terrestrial animals, is older, and is therefore served by the former (Dawn, p. 38). The offspring of human-Oankali mating will inhabit the Amazon basin and be free of this genetically rooted contradiction that led to the war that nearly destroyed all life on Earth. 'Contradiction' is something of a motif in these novels, as Jim Miller's synopsis suggests:
Butler's aliens are both colonizers and a utopian collective, while the captured/saved humans are both admirable survivors and ugly xenophobes. Lilith Iyapo, the main character in Dawn, is both the mother of a new race and a Judas to humanity. In the process of reading the trilogy, we confront and negotiate these contradictions, as Butler prods us to move beyond old dilemmas and imagine a different future. (2)
Moreover, Butler's aliens, the Oankali, come bearing the gifts of making the planet liveable once again and liberating humans from the hierarchical thinking that ensures their extinction. That extinction could be seen as hastened by the cross-breeding that the gene-trading Oankali offer/impose, which simultaneously extends both species' existence into the future. 'Contradiction' also connects Xenogenesis to concepts such as the Hegelian dialectic and Derridean deconstruction, despite Butler's ostensible allergy to critical theory. (3)
In American society 'race' appears to be another sort of contradiction. Efforts to combat racism by declaring race to be 'merely' a social construct or scientifically--genetically, to be specific--meaningless often fail to consider adequately the race consciousness and/or race pride that contribute to the ability of raced groups to endure, resist, and dismantle the racism they encounter. Although there is no denying that the racial categories with which we are familiar have little or no meaning at the level of molecular biology, there is also no denying that race has been a structuring element in American society, politics, and culture since the country's origins. Although Donna Haraway rightly calls race 'a fracturing trauma in the body politic of the nation', when she states that 'race has a lot to answer for', (4) she may be more correct than she realizes. As a text by an African-American writer that focuses on genetic engineering, Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy has much to contribute to ongoing debates about race and identity politics, and much of the extant criticism on the series is oriented towards such issues.
Because of Butler's tendency to revise and respond to works and tropes from the traditions of African-American literature and SF simultaneously, Roger Luckhurst has described her fictions as 'miscegenate'; although some find this term to be irretrievably linked to discourses dedicated to maintaining racial purity, Luckhurst employs it in order to speak to how Butler's 'discomfiting hybrid texts' have generic identities that are difficult to fix. (5) The hybrid aspect of Xenogenesis is analysed with further specificity by Cathy Peppers, who identifies how the trilogy places some of 'our culture's most powerful origin stories'--the biblical story of sexual differentiation, the sociobiological narrative of the genetic production of identities, and the palaeoanthropological story of evolution from prehistoric ancestors--in dialogic relation with each other and with 'the narrative of the African diaspora and slavery (a/the origin story of African-American identity)'. (6) The interrogation and 'retelling' of narratives of origin is a key component of Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto', which asserts 'the cyborg myth' as a figure for an identity politics that 'skips the step of original unity' and embraces 'transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and contradictory standpoints'. (7) The cyborg serves as an antidote to, among other things, the conception of 'woman' as pure and whole, which enabled early Second Wave feminism's innocence to differences of race, class, and sexuality. For example, Haraway writes that '"women of colour" might be understood as a cyborg identity (because it is) a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities'. (8) The 'Manifesto' lists Butler among the SF writers invoked as 'theorists for cyborgs', and pays particular attention to both 'Lilith' as an allusion to 'Adam's first and repudiated wife' and to the 'intimate fusion' of humans and Oankali. (9)
Like the cyborg and the miscegenate text, the posthuman body 'refuses fixity, definition, (and) boundaries' according to Naomi Jacobs, who interprets the Xenogenesis trilogy as 'a series of perspectives on posthumanity', that is, participating in 'the postmodern critique of the humanist subject: the critique of the individual as a rationally self-determining, self-defining being, and of individual identity as the source of agency'. (10) Although Butler betrays some misgivings about the utopian, posthuman future offered by the Oankali in this series, Jacobs argues that the posthuman provides both the best hope for Butler's fictional humans and a hopeful tone within the trilogy itself. Jacobs's reading of Xenogenesis as a 'critical dystopia'--Tom Moylan's term for texts engaged in 'making room for and giving voice to emergent forms of political consciousness and agency that speak to the condition of the times' (11)--differs from that of Hoda M. Zaki, who is troubled by 'Butler's unmediated connections between biology and behavior', which foreclose the possibility of social and political change; Zaki therefore characterizes Butler's writing as a form of 'pessimistic, or anti-utopian, dystopianism', informed in part by an African-American 'critique of the liberal feminist imagination and politics expressed in contemporary feminist SF'. (12) Moreover, Zaki sees Xenogenesis as Butler's contribution to the debate within feminism on essentialist and materialist approaches to gender. The trilogy imagines 'the human contradiction' to be genetically based, and human-born males as more likely to express the contradiction than females, on which Zaki bases the contention that Xenogenesis promotes 'an essentialist view of human nature similar to that of some radical feminists, such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray'. (13) Zaki's reading has implications, problematic ones, for how the reader interprets the explanation given for the Oankali's choice of Lilith as leader of the human survivors. Lilith's lover Joseph asks her, 'Do you understand why they chose you--someone who desperately doesn't want the responsibility, who doesn't want to lead, who is a woman?' (Dawn, p. 157). Gender essentialism would establish a causal link between Lilith's gender and her ambivalence to the power concomitant with leadership. However, the assertion that women are innately reluctant to occupy leadership positions, quite evidently, is at odds with (contradicts) both Xenogenesis's feminism and the reader's common sense.
Essentialism--identifying an individual, group, or oneself as belonging to an identity category 'on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences' (14)--is also a concept frequently discussed and, above all, critiqued by Walter Benn Michaels, whose 'Political Science Fictions' includes readings of texts by SF writers such as Orson Scott Card and Kim Stanley Robinson; the essay makes particularly intriguing use...
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