University of Tehran Research in Contemporary World Literature 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Ontogenesis, Memory, and Evolutionary Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed Ontogenesis, Memory, and Evolutionary Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed 345 363 107739 10.22059/jor.2026.413655.2836 FA Fatimah Harbi Hamad Department of English Languages and Literature, Kish Campus, University of Tehran, Kish, Iran Mohammad Hosein Ramezan Kiaee Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran 0009-0009-2952-5453 Journal Article 2026 05 05 This article triangulates a close reading of Butler’s Wild Seed (2020) with trauma theory and posthuman/materialist frameworks in order to show how the novel reconceives memory as an archive that exceeds the individual. What is remembered does not remain private recollection; rather, it circulates through bodies, practices, and reproductive histories, through what is done and what is endured. Memory is not merely content but transmission, and in Butler’s chronopolitics, transmission is never neutral. The article further argues that Butler’s narrative form compresses human timescales into evolutionary duration, producing a chronopolitics in which futurity is neither progressive promise nor abstract “after,” but a contested field of embodied costs. Ecology, reproduction, and kinship are not a thematic background. They operate as political infrastructures. For this reason, Wild Seed continues to trouble and instruct debates in environmental humanities, reproductive justice, and bioethics. It shows how “life” is made governable, even as it insists, without consolation, that ethical futurity must be rebuilt through stewardship, relational accountability, and the right to refuse extraction. This article triangulates a close reading of Butler’s Wild Seed (2020) with trauma theory and posthuman/materialist frameworks in order to show how the novel reconceives memory as an archive that exceeds the individual. What is remembered does not remain private recollection; rather, it circulates through bodies, practices, and reproductive histories, through what is done and what is endured. Memory is not merely content but transmission, and in Butler’s chronopolitics, transmission is never neutral. The article further argues that Butler’s narrative form compresses human timescales into evolutionary duration, producing a chronopolitics in which futurity is neither progressive promise nor abstract “after,” but a contested field of embodied costs. Ecology, reproduction, and kinship are not a thematic background. They operate as political infrastructures. For this reason, Wild Seed continues to trouble and instruct debates in environmental humanities, reproductive justice, and bioethics. It shows how “life” is made governable, even as it insists, without consolation, that ethical futurity must be rebuilt through stewardship, relational accountability, and the right to refuse extraction. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107739_2b4398f8c60d5dd9b8e3c786a3745192.pdf