Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires (review)

Gregory Jerome Hampton’s Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires represents a new era in Butler criticism as the volume is the first peer-reviewed book devoted solely to the critical discussion and investigation of Butler’s fiction. Combining sophisticated analysis with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender, Hampton examines the needling questions of biblical authority, science fiction in biblical narratives, and the liberating aspects of the science-fiction genre, most notably as it relates to Butler’s African American female protagonists. Hampton’s work reshapes and redefines the questions, concerns, and scholarship that determine how Butler functions in the genre of science fiction and suggests that Butler appropriates science fiction to discuss the question, “What can science fiction learn from critical race theory and the African American woman’s experience, and vice versa?” The power of his analysis is that he offers a combination of grounded, well-articulated critical theory alongside a careful, attentive reading of texts—an important combination to further elevate current Butler discourse.

In Changing Bodies Hampton’s keen insight and fresh perspectives on the subject matter, which has been featured in articles and reviews but not in a full-length critical study, allows his work to succeed in bringing together different theoretical frameworks (such as critical race theory, biblical hermeneutics, Womanism) to isolate and interrogate a specific corpus of African American female science fiction. In this regard, Hampton’s work stands as a high-water mark in the integration of critical race theory into mainstream science fiction. The book is laid out in two sections. Part 1 includes the introduction and scholarship, and Part 2 includes useful supplementary information. The introduction provides a concise critical history of the science-fiction genre and the inspiration for his study. His thesis, that “Slaves, aliens, and vampires are the metaphors that Butler’s fiction has used to highlight the construction and valuing of the marginalized body” (xxiii), succinctly sets the stage for his discussions of race, gender, and hybridity. While each of the chapters discusses a different text, and sometimes a series of texts, the body remains the central focus.

In Chapter 1, “Kindred: History, Revision, and (Re)memory,” Hampton considers the body a text or a blank canvas that has the ability to be re-written over time. Chapter 2, “Wildseed: The Paradox of Bodily Inscription,” theorizes Wildseed (1980) and the spectrum of approaches in the use of the body, especially as Anayanwu and Doro are shape-shifters, able to transform their bodies and genetic disposition into any human (and, in the case of Anyanwu, human and animal) entity. Chapter 3, “Patternmaster: Hierarchies of Identity,” focuses Butler’s Patternmaster series, giving particular attention to race and ethnicity and the role they play in the definition of the body, and Chapter 4, “Discussing Duality and the Cthonic: Octavia Butler, Wole Soyinka, and W. E. B. Du Bois,” discusses the ambiguity of the African American body as it relates to hybridity, race, and gender. Chapter 5, “Religious Science Fiction: Butler’s Changing God,” in its discussion of Parable of the Sower and Bloodchild, takes the reader through the religious and spiritual markings that affect bodies/characters in Butler’s fiction. Chapter 6, “Migration of the Hybrid Body,” draws upon preceding chapters and extends the discussion of the hybrid briefly explored in Chapter 4. Hampton discusses Parable of the Sower (1993) and Mind of My Mind (1976) and concludes that the hybrid body, at least in the context of Butler’s fiction, is constructed as inextricably valuable. Chapter 7, “Vampires and Utopia: Reading Racial and Gender Politics in the Fiction of Octavia Butler,” focuses on Butler’s final novel, Fledgling, and it is in this chapter that Hampton suggests that Butler uses science fiction, as a genre, to address the socio-political issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Changing Bodies, in addition to exploring themes of maternalism, African American...