Thinking through the experiences of the novel's protagonist (Shori), both in terms of her symbiotic relationship with humans and how her willfulness is resisted by other vampires, helps clarify the normative implications of Ahmed's and Ẑiẑek's disagreements about multiculturalism. It does so by reading the story in the space between Sara Ahmed's theory of affective economies and Slavoj Ẑiẑek's Lacanian psychoanalysis. This paper provides a critical reading of the willful and speculative subjectivities of Octavia Butler's final novel, Fledgling (2005). It ends on a speculative note meant to imagine the possibilities within the promise of science fiction. In so doing, it avers that a more curated conversation between McKittrick and Wynter, one already ongoing, and Octavia Butler, through Mind of My Mind from her Patternist series, expands our notions of the human as a category even at the risk of seeing it wither as a politic or praxis. It then contends that Katherine McKittrick’s rearticulation of the Promise of Science can be extended to incorporate the promise of science fiction. It argues that Afrofuturism has the potential to interrupt the linear progression from human to posthuman and that Octavia Butler’s Fledgling proffers a narrative of race as a technology that disrupts the presumed post-raciality of posthumanism and transhumanism. Working through Sylvia Wynter’s theories of the rise of Man-as-human in particular, the project highlights how black thought on the human displaces the uncritical whiteness of posthumanist thought. Each is meant to allude to the generative potential in different iterations of black thought that engages the human. It articulates five categories of analysis: displace, interrupt, disrupt, expand, and wither.

This thesis engages black critical thought on the human and its contemporary iterations in posthumanism and transhumanism.

Octavia E. Butler by Gerry Canavan