Ontogenesis, Memory, and Evolutionary Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed

مقالات آماده انتشار

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان

1 Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 Department of English Languages and Literature, Kish Campus, University of Tehran, Kish, Iran

10.22059/jor.2026.413655.2836

چکیده

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.

کلیدواژه‌ها

موضوعات

عنوان مقاله [English]

Ontogenesis, Memory, and Evolutionary Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed

نویسندگان [English]

  • Mohammad Hosein Ramezan Kiaee 1
  • Fatimah Harbi Hamad 2
1 Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
2 Department of English Languages and Literature, Kish Campus, University of Tehran, Kish, Iran
چکیده [English]

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.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • Wild Seed
  • Memory
  • posthuman
  • chronopolitics
  • futurity

مراجع

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Butler, Octavia E. Wild Seed. Grand Central Publishing, 2020.
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انتشار آنلاین از تاریخ 10 تیر 1405

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