“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of supportive wives. The mode of speculative fiction is well suited to crafting counter-narratives to Exodus mythology because of its ability to place marginalized voices in the center from the stance of ‘What next?’ My project is a hybrid in that I combine critical theory with original poems. The prose section of each chapter contextualizes a novel and its author with regard to Exodus mythology. However, because novels can only reveal so much about character development, I identify spaces to engage and elaborate upon the conversation incited by these authors’ feminist protagonists. In the tradition of Black American poets such as, Ai, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and Tyehimba Jess, in my own personal creative work, I regularly engage historical figures through recovering the narratives of underrepresented voices. To write in persona or limited omniscient, spotlighting an event where the reader possesses incomplete information surrounding a character’s experience, the result becomes a kind of call-and-response interaction with these novels.

Ce mémoire explore les notions de race et d’identité féminine à travers le récit afro-futuriste Wild Seed d’Octavia Butler. Décrit comme le nouveau genre de la ‘fiction spéculative’ par les théoriciens universitaires, l’afro-futurisme joint le spéculatif au réalisme afin d’explorer les conjonctions entre les diasporas africaines, l’écriture africaine américaine et les technologies modernes. Cette thèse propose une analyse critique et théorique du roman Wild Seed d’Octavia Butler, en se concentrant particulièrement sur ses divers concepts et ses allégories historiques. Plutôt que d’ignorer le rôle que jouent les notions de race et d’identité dans la science-fiction, Butler les met en avant dans le roman Wild Seed et les questionne en adressant des sujets tels que l’après-colonisation, la tyrannie intime, l’hybridité, la différence, l’altérité, et l’identité. Dans le premier chapitre, j’examinerais tout particulièrement l’influence de la domination de la colonisation patriarcale occidental et l’occidentalisation des africains-américains. Puis, à travers les thèmes du trauma intergénérationnel lié à l’esclavage et de l'objectification des corps noirs qui apparaissent dans le texte, j’analyserais les contradictions présentent dans la lutte des Noirs pour la liberté, la race, et l’incarnation raciale. Le second chapitre explorera les différentes formes de résistance, dramatisées à travers le personnage d’Anyanwu, ainsi que l’utilisation des notions d’espace et de temporalité comme techniques pour comprendre et associer ensemble les problèmes d’incarnation et d’identité des genres: afin de survivre à la domination et au pouvoir perpétrés par la société patriarcale de Doro, Anyanwu doit résister, redéfinir, et reconquérir son identité. / This thesis explores the notions of race and female identity through Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist narrative Wild Seed. Described as a new genre of ‘speculative fiction’ by scholars, Afrofuturism converges speculative and realist modes in order to explore conjunctions between African diasporas, African American writing, and modern technologies. This thesis provides a theoretical and critical analysis of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, with a particular focus on its various concepts and historical allegories. The novel Wild Seed addresses such topics as post-colonialization, intimate tyranny, hybridity, difference, otherness, and identity, questioning and foregrounding the role race and identity plays in science fiction. In the first Chapter, I will specifically examine the influence of dominant patriarchal Western colonization and its Westernization of African Americans. Then I will analyze the contradictions within the black struggle for freedom, race, and racialized embodiment through the themes of the intergenerational trauma of slavery and the objectification of black bodies found in the text. The second chapter will explore the different forms of resistance dramatized through Anyanwu’s character, as well as the use of space and temporality as a process to understand and connect the issues of embodiment and gender identity: Anyanwu has to resist, redefine, and reclaim her identity in order to survive the domination and power of Doro’s future patriarchal and biogenetically altered society.