N’goran Constant Yao
From a general point of view, science fiction must stir up wonder and fairylike settings in the mind of the reader. Octavia Estelle Butler has subverted that stereotype. She has succeeded to free science fiction from the dominance of the white male authors and their use of that subgenre of the novel to reinforce the narratives of imperialism and white domination. More interestingly, she has used it to address serious sociopolitical issues such as patriarchy, sexism, racism and imperialism; all paradigms of oppression that Butler subverts. By allowing her narratives to navigate between the past and the future, she builds a narrative aesthetic that paves a way for the critique of slavery and its corollaries. In so doing, she postulates that the motifs of travel in her works constitute a key tool in de-essentializing all the paradigms of oppression. Finally, she offers a path for the imagination of a humankind deprived of all hegemonies as a result of the subversion of all the essentialisms.
