Multiethnic Literatures in the U.S.

Karen Tei Yamashita

Date of Birth: January 8, 1951 (Oakland, California) (57 years of age)
Education: Carleton College in (Minnesota)
Graduated Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in English and Japanese Literature
Yamashita spent her junior year I college as an exchange student at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Occupation: Japanese American writer, Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. Karen Tei Yamashita teaches creative writing and Asian American Literature.
Books: Circle K Cycles (2001), Tropic of Orange (1997, Brazil-Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990)
Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer as well as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yamashita grew up in Los Angeles California before attending Carleton College in Minnesota. She also spent a year in Japan as an exchange student as a junior. In 1975 Yamashita moved to Brazil where she lived for nine years in Sao Paolo. In Brazil she was able to study Japanese immigration to Brazil. Also, in Brazil she met her current husband Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira (Architect). In 1984 the family, Karen, Ronaldo, and her two children Jon and Jane moved back to California. They currently live in Santa Cruz, California.
In California Yamashita continued to write short stories and plays. Her first book was published in 1990, Through the Arc of the Rainforest by the Coffee House Press. She received awards for the book, the American Book Award and the Janet Hedinger Kafka Award. Later in 1992, Yamashita’s second book was published, Brazil Maru, followed by Tropic of Orange (1997), and Circle K Cycles (2001).
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Tei_Yamashita http://faculty.washington.edu/kendo/yamashita.html http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/yamashita_karen_tei.html

Karen Tei Yamashita – Bibliography

Kusei: An Endangered Species. Yamashita, Karen Tei, and Karen Mayeda. 1986.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Brazil-Maru. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Circle K Cycles. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001
Yamashita, Karen Tei. O-Men: An American Kabuki. 1978
Yamashita, Karen Tei. “The Dentist and the Dental Hygenist.” Hermes. 55 (1995)

Yamashita, Karen Tei. “The Orange.” Chicago Review. 39.3.4 (1993)

Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through the Arc of the Rainforest. Minneapolis: Coffee House
Press, 1990.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993.

Karen Tei Yamashita Annotated Bibliography

Campbell, John R.B. 1991. Through the arc of the rain forest (book review). The New York Times Book Review. 16.
In the article referenced above, Mr. Campbell reviews Yamashita’s first book- Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. He speaks positively about the book for the most part saying Yamashita “captures… the complexity of Brazilian culture.” He also comments on her ability to show readers the terrible truth of reality in a poetic fashion.

Chuh, Kandice. Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World. American Literary History. 18.3: 618-37.
Chuh discusses how Yamashita’s novels have impacted Asian-American and hemispheric studies through her writings on Brazil and a national identity. She analyzes how Yamashita’s works challenge us to look at what drives people and how their desires affect individuals as well as the community around them.

Kaye, Janet. 1998. Tropic of orange (book review). The New York Times Book Review. 103 (1):16.
This article is a book review of Tropic of Orange and it appears in The New York Times Book Review, published weekly. The author gives credit to Karen Tei Yamashita for being witty and giving us a plot that allows us to see that some individuals (in this case Emi & Gabriel) can be so consumed in their own lives, they don’t notice the destruction of the world around them. The critical part of the article comes when she writes that the book becomes disappointing toward the end with a little too much formal controversy.

Lee, Sue-Im. 2007. “We Are Not the World”: Global Village, Universalism, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange(Critical Essay). MFS Modern Fiction Studies. 53.3: 501-527.
Lee examines how the book looks at the globalist “we” and how it affects universalism. In Tropic of Orange, Yamashita strips people of their “material inequalities” so they will see how similar all people really are. Lee also discusses the representation of a global village in Tropic that is based on logic of consumers, meaning that because people can taste another culture’s food or see it’s people, they have experienced another culture.

Mallot, J. Edward. 2004.”Signs taken for wonders, wonders taken for dollar signs: Karen Tei Yamashita and the commodification of miracle.” ARIEL 35.3-4: 115(23). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. CIC University of Illinois Chicago. 17 Feb. 2008.
The basic style of Mallot’s piece is quoting a passage from Yamashita’s books and describing what is represents in the real world. He discusses Yamashita’s representation of Brazil, economic situations, money, commodities and even men. He concludes that people will try to exploit miracles because consumers will insist on having them.

Rauch, Molly E. 1998. “Tropic of Orange.” The Nation 266. n7. 28(3). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. CIC University of Illinois Chicago. 17 Feb. 2008
Throughout the article, Rauch discusses oranges, from the one on Gabriel’s ranch to the shipment of spiked oranges from Brazil that lead to the freeway destruction. She refers to the book as a collage in which Yamashita has given us seven days and thrown the lives of seven people on a path to entanglement with metaphors operating untamed.

Rody, Caroline. 2000. Impossible voices: ethnic postmodern narration in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Contemporary Literature. 41.4: 618-41.
This article looks at the post modern use of narrative voices in Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Morrison’s Jazz. They give us new perspective on narrators, abandoning the know-it-all that is much too common. Instead, they use a mystery person who seems to know just enough.

Shan, Te-hsing. 2006. Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita. Amerasia Journal. 32:3: p123-142.
This is an interview with Karen Tei Yamashita, in which she talks about her family as well as her heritage.

It’s 2052 in Los Angeles. The setting of this novel is much like the one we see in Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”; resources are scarce, there is a large division between the rich and the poor, and world has become increasingly violent.
Francie is 19 years old and lives with her Auntie Annie and her aunt’s boyfriend, Rohn, who make deliveries on the black market for a living. Francie’s parents died of a disease when she was just a little girl. In the beginning of the story Rohn disappears while on a delivery with Annie and Francie. He tries to illegally purchase water from Max the Magician. Annie and Francie are unsure of what has happened to Rohn but they believe he might have been arrested. Francie’s aunt has a hard time coping with his loss, and we see her begin to slip into a state of hopelessness. She starts to gain weight, not care about her appearance, ultimately becoming lazy. On the other hand, Francie quickly gets over his disappearance because she feels it is useless to grieve; there are other things that need to be done besides to continue worrying.
Francie’s plants represent her Auntie Annie in a strange way. When Annie’s source of hope, Rohn, is gone Francie becomes frustrated with her constantly grieving aunt and describes her garden as a complete mess. “I wanted to rip them out by their roots and be done with them. I watered and fed them instead,” she says. She begins to take care of her plants like never before around the time when she explains her concern for her aunt when she leaves to search for Rohn.
Already we begin to see that hope is a major theme throughout this novel. Despite the chaotic world around her, Francie has never-ending hope for the future much like Lauren in Parable of the Sower. Shortly after Rohn’s disappearance when Francie was making a delivery, she is hit by a care leaving her hospitalized for 5 weeks. Following her long hospital stay, Francie gets an itch to do something different with her life. Feeling the need to do something, she decides to go back to college and move out. Also, around this point in the novel her aunt makes the decision to move out of the bungalow her, Francie, and Rohn once lived in as a family. We see a parallel relationship between her aunt and Francie’s plants again. Francie sells her plants saying, “Even my plants sometimes began to seem inert rather than full of life. I still loved them, but I needed a vacation from their demands.” It is time for Francie to move on and begin a life of her own. She has to get away from her aunt just as she does her plants because they may be holding her down. It will be interesting to see where Francie’s unusual sense of hope will take her.

Biography

Cynthia Kadohata 

            Cynthia Kadohata was born in Chicago in 1956 to two Japanese-American parents.  However she did not live in Chicago for a very long time.  A few months after she was born, Kadohata’s father got a job in Georgia as a chicken sexer.  Again when Cynthia was two her father found another chicken tenant job in Arkansas.  The years following she moved from Arkansas to Michigan, then back Chicago.  Finally at age fifteen, Kadohata’s family settled in Los Angeles. 

            Originally Kadohata had no plans to become an author while attending high school in LA.  Her dream job in high school was to be an astronaut.  There was one major problem with her dream, she had severe motion sickness.  Cynthia Kadohata finished high school early and started classes at Los Angeles City College.  After Los Angeles City College she attended the University of Southern California, where she received a degree in journalism.         

            A few months after graduating Cynthia Kadohata was hit by a car while crossing the street.  She broke her collarbone and severely damaged her arm and was unable to live on her own.  Cynthia Kadohata went to Boston to live with her sister while she recovered.  Kadohata began writing and submitting her stories to magazines and newspapers while she was healing.  After four long years of writing stories the New Yorker published one of her stories called Charlie O.  Shortly after getting her story published she was discovered by Andrew Wylie. 

            After joining Andrew Wylie, Kadohata grew tremendously as an author.  She wrote her first published novel, The Floating World and many of her other first few novels with Wylie.  He challenged her, even though she would not want to cooperate for the first few times.

            Later on in Kadohata’s career, she wrote her first children’s book, Kira-Kira.  After years of writing adult novels, Cynthia Kadohata was greatly praised for her children’s literature.  In fact, Kadohata won the 2005 John Newbury award for children’s literature.

            Cynthia Kadohata claims that much of her inspiration for her novels comes from her travels, both as a child and as an adult.  Kadohata said “just thinking about the American landscape and focusing on it, puts me in touch with what I think of as real, essential me.  I have to be in touch with the real, essential me whenever I sit down to write.”  Nothing inspires Cynthia Kadohata more than the road.

            Today Cynthia Kadohata is still living in Los Angeles but is making tours around the United States to promote her books.  Kadohata just released two books in the past two years Weedflower and CRACKER! The Best Dog in Vietnam.  Both of these books are children’s novels.

 Bibliography

28 Jan. 2008 <http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ge-La/Kadohata-Cynthia.html>.

 28 Jan. 2008 http://www.kira-kira.us/cyn.htm. Bibliography

Cynthia Kadohata Bibliography

• The Floating World (1989)
• In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992)
• The Glass Mountains (1996)
• Kira-Kira (2004)
• Weedflower (2006)
• Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam (2007)

Annotated Bibliography   Works Cited Comer, Krista. “Western Literature At the Cnetury’s End: Sketches in Generation X, Los Angeles, and the Post-Civil Rights Novel.” The Pacific Historical Review 3rd ser. 72 (2003):  405-413. JSTOR. 12 Feb.  This work investigates how the writings of both Cynthia Kadohata and Sandra Ysing Loh comment on politics and culture of the “post-Civil Rights” era.  This work by Comer, in relation to Kadohata, states that she writes about new issues for Japanese Americans.  In particular, the writer describes the “post-internment scramble of Japanese Americans to survive and rebuild their loves” (Comer 408) in Kadohata’s works.  Comer also examines how class warfare, where nonwhites are considered the majority, brings about the “apocalyptic moment” in “In the Heart of the Valley of Love.”  Comer explains the loss of human attachment in Kadohata’s novel.  Comer also writes about the effect of consumer culture on American youth, as reflected in Kadohata’s and Loh’s writings. D’aguiar, Fred. “Review: the Diminutive Epic.” Third World Quarterly 1st ser. 12 (1990):  215-217. JSTOR. 12 Feb. 2008.  This work by D’aguiar discusses the influences of Kadohata’s writing from writers like Kazuo Ishiguro.  He examines the subject matter that is presented in Kadohata’s writing, such as the lives of Japanese Americans and their journey to survive in America. Matsumoto, Valerie. “Review: Pearls and Rocks.” The Women\_Review of Books 2nd ser. 7 (1989):  5-6. JSTOR. 12 Feb. 2008.  This article reviews “The Floating World” by Cynthia Kadohata.  Matsumoto comments on how the immigrant life of Japanese in America is reflected in this novel’s characters and their lives.  She writes about how Katohata shows “the struggles of generations coming to terms with their history.” (Matsumoto 6)

Octavia Estelle Butler Biography
Octavia E. Butler was an only child born June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, California. Her father, Laurice, worked as a shoeshine man, while her mother, Octavia M. worked as a maid. Her father died when she was young; therefore Octavia was raised by her mother and grandmother. Octavia grew up in a very racially mixed neighborhood and was diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age. She also grew up in a strict Baptist household. At the age of 12, Octavia first got into writing science fiction after seeing the film “Devil Girl from Mars”. Though she was shy as a child, Octavia overcame her shyness and received her associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1963. She then pursued her education at California State University in Los Angeles and then at UCLA. One of Octavia’s most inspiring workshops was with Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1970, which soon followed her first novel, “Crossover”. Butler’s most popular novel was “Kindred” which was published in 1976. “Kindred” was about a black woman who goes back in time to slavery before the Civil War. In 1995 Octavia E. Butler became the first science fiction writer to win the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. Butler moved to Seattle, Washington in 1999. Octavia went through a writers block during after writing the first two novels in the Parable series. In 2005 she published a novel “Fledgling” which helped her to get back on track with a third and last of the Parable trilogy. Unfortunately due to her early death after falling off the stairs in her house and striking her head she was not able to finish her novel. Butler achieved many awards in her lifetime for her writings, including two Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards. However, Butler was mostly known for exposing readers to the injustices of society through her metaphors in her science fiction novels. More so than what she shared through her writing, Butler was also a pioneer in a field dominated by white male writers. As a result of this, a scholarship fund was established to help writers of color to attend one of Clarion workshops, where she was inspired and got started.

Octavia E. Butler Bibliography :
In 1974, she started the novel Patternmaster, which became her first published book in 1976, though it would become the fifth in the Patternist series. Over the next eight years, she would publish four more novels in the same story line, though the publication dates of the novels do not match the internal order of the series.
• Wild Seed (1980)
• Mind of my Mind (1977)
• Clay’s Ark (1984)
• Survivor (1978)
• Patternmaster (1976)
In 1979, she published Kindred, a novel that uses the science-fiction staple of time travel to explore slavery in the United States. In this story, Dana, an African American woman, is inexplicably transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, an African American woman who was born free but forced into slavery later in life.
• Kindred (1979)
Next came Lilith’s Brood, formerly Xenogenesis, novels which are available separately or collected in one volume. They tell the story of the human survivors of an apocalyptic war as they are joined and genetically altered by extraterrestrials that have an affinity for strangers.
• Dawn (1987)
• Adulthood Rites (1988)
• Imago (1989)
And the two collected versions of all three novels:
• Xenogenesis (Hard cover, 1989)
• Lilith’s Brood (Trade Paperback, 2000)
Next came the two Parable novels. These take readers into the world of economic, environmental, and social chaos that we seem to be creating, and they offer a few solutions, both malignant and benign.
• Parable of the Sower (1993)
• Parable of the Talents (1998)
She eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in the 2005 novel, Fledgling, a vampire novel with a science-fiction context. Although Butler herself passed Fledgling off as a lark, the novel is connected to her other works through its exploration of race, sexuality, and what it means to be a member of a community. Moreover, the novel continues the theme, raised explicitly in Parable of the Sower, that diversity is a biological imperative.
• Fledgling (2005)
And finally, there is a book of short fiction and essays including title story, Bloodchild, Speech Sounds, The Evening and the Morning and the Night, and others.
• Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995)

“In the Heart of the Valley of Love” takes place in a similar setting as that of “The Parable of the Sower.” Francie, the story’s main character, lives in Los Angeles in the 2050’s, a place where crime, violence, and poverty have become the norm throughout most of the United States. Water and gasoline are rationed, education is poor, and fresh food is expensive and difficult to come by. The rich and poor are segregated, as the upper class white live in what is known as “Richtown,” and the poor non-whites live outside of its walls. In general, the world seems to be in chaos. In contrast to Octavia Butler’s novel, Cynthia Kadohata makes the setting around her characters a mere backdrop, her focus being the character’s emotions. Amongst these emotions, as indicated by the title of the book, love and hope are the core to Kadohata’s novel.
The relationships presented in the novel have become integral to the plot. Every character encountered thus far has, in one form or another, a significant other. The book starts with Auntie Annie and Rohn taking Francie with them on their deliveries. Rohn is only Auntie’s second boyfriend and she is deeply in love with him. Auntie Annie is Francie’s caregiver so naturally this relationship has become an aspiration for Francie.
Jewel, a coworker of Francie at the school newspaper, has a boyfriend named Teddy. Teddy is abusive to Jewel and Francie first meets him after getting out of jail, but nonetheless, Jewel is in love with him. While Francie personally does not like Teddy, she aspires to what they have: each other. Similarly, Emmy and Hank, Jewel’s parents, have a strange relationship. They seem to almost ignore one another, but in Francie’s eyes, they are also in love. Jewel comments that they haven’t had sex in years, but Francie sees something different: “I thought they did have sex, in a slightly ashamed way ashamed not because of how much they didn’t want each other but because of how much they did.” Francie’s recognition of their need for one another, despite their actions towards each other, alludes to the idea that Francie herself is ready to accept love.
When Francie decides to take some classes at a local community college, she meets a boy named Mark. Mark works for the school newspaper and they quickly become boyfriend and girlfriend. It is too early to tell if they are in love, but the dominant theme about the need and importance of love leaves the reader predicting (and hoping) that this will work out for Francie.
Hope and love go hand in hand in the early stages of this novel. The scene where Francie, Mark, and Jewel celebrate Easter with Rohn’s relatives sticks out in my mind. Francie did not want to go, but went along for the respect she has for Rohn. The setting is described as annoying: a little girl is waving an egg in Francie’s face, a woman is playing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” on a guitar. But Francie says, “So what were we all doing there? It was just that my aunt had fallen in love with Rohn, and Rohn’s sister and her husband had fallen in love, and his parents had once been in love, and so on. That’s why I was standing there watching Alma wave an Easter egg in my face.” Francie wants to believe, and has hope, in the possibility of love, but she does not have it yet, leaving her alone and annoyed. This excerpt not only shows just how much hope she has for love and a better way of life for everyone around her, but that she wants it for herself too. It is going to be interesting to see where this hope leads and if, ultimately, it leads Francie to finding love.

Annotated Bibliography

Octavia E Butler 

1. Butler, Octavia E. Interview with Susan McHenry. Essence Vol. 29 Issue 10 Feb. 1999: 80.

The interview is about Octavia Butler explaining her style of work. Butler talks about how she combines science fiction with what we go through today in the Parable of the Sower. Butler also talks about how people who aren’t into science fiction like her work because instead of gaining magical powers, her characters lose something they used to have.

  2. Stillman, Peter G. “Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables.”Utopian Studies 14 (2003): 15-35.

This article talks about how Octavia Butler portrays possible dystopian and utopian societies in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Stillman explains that Butler shows possibilities of the future with the destruction of communities, the growth of private power, and a strong religious movement. Stillman also argues that Butler presents solutions on how human beings can act with others to change themselves or the world.  

3. Butler, Octavia E. Interview with Jackson H. Jerome. Crisis Apr. 1994: 4-6.

In this interview, Butler talks about her roll as a science fiction novelist. She also talks about how the emphasis on The Parable of the Sower is to portray events that are happening in the present like racial and gender struggles.

  4. Govan, Sandra. “The “Parable of the Sower” as Rendered by Octavia Butler: Lessons

       for Our Changing Times.” Femspec 4, no. 2 (2003): 239-258.

The article talks about the lessons that readers should learn in the Parable of the Sower. Govan talks about how Butler questions gender roles, portrays how the illiterate and uneducated will be victimized, and how saving the humanity is a choice and decision we can make.

  5. Zaki, Hoda. “Future Tense.” Women’s Review of Books. Vol. XI, Nos. 10 and 11,  July, 1994: pp. 37-8.

In this article Zaki summarizes Octavia Butler’s book Parable of the Sower and compares it to some of her other novels. Zaki thoroughly explains the significance of human survival in the communities of Robledo, Oliver, and Earthseed. Additionally, Butler’s reoccurring theme of racial differences and overcoming differences is discussed in this article.

    6. Pfeiffer, John R. “Octavia Butler Writes the Bible.” Shaw and Other Matters. 140-54. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1998: pp. 140-54

Throughout this article, Pfeiffer describes how Butler continually makes biblical references in her novels. Pfeiffer actually goes through every novel that makes references to the bible and critically analyzes the meaning behind them. Pfeiffer says that Butler is constantly challenging the bible’s weak spots and welcoming its strong points.

  7. Jablon, Madelyn. “Metafiction as Genre” Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. University of Iowa Press, 1997: pp. 139-65.

This is an interesting article that talks about Octavia Butler’s impact on the genre of science fiction and more particularly, the impact of her novel Parable of the Sower. Jablon attempts to explain how Parable of the Sower makes divisions between the real and fictive world.

  8. Clara Escoda Agustí, Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Extrapolation 46, no. 3 (fall 2005): 351-59.

The article by Clara Escoda Agusti examines how Octavia E. Butler uses female characters to describe a male dominated world in Parable of the Sower.  Butler uses Lauren to describe how she overcomes a male dominate world.  Butler also uses other female characters to show what happens to females in a male dominated world.  Clara Escoda Agusti also states in this article that Lauren creates Acorn to counteract the world view of male domination and to make the community where male and females are equal.         

9. Patricia Melzer, “All That You Touch You Change’: Utopian Desire and the Concept of  Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.“ FEMSPEC 3, no. 2 (2002): 31-52.

This article by Patricia Melzer describes the similarities and difference between the Parable of the Talents and the Parable of the Sower.  It does this by examining the feminist notions of utopia, politics, and writing style that Octavia E Butler uses in each novel.   

  10. Jerry Phillips, “The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Novel 35, nos. 2/3 (spring 2002): 299-311.

This article by Jerry Phillips examines how Octavia E Butler uses two pathways to design a modern utopia. The two pathways describes by Phillips are application of bureaucratic rationality to socioeconomic problems through the agency of the state and second, the constitution of communities of “them” and “us” through the politics of race.  The author of the articles states that Butler tries to influence her audience’s way of thinking and doing.  The author states Butler does this by predicting and writing about current trend that will shock her readers because it is very familiar to them.  

  11. Madhu Dubey, “Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women’s Fiction: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (spring 1999): 103-28.

The article by Madhu Dubey examines the differences of southern folk to Parable of the Sower.  It describes how Octavia E Butler uses social and political ideas to extend the boundaries of fantasy.   

12. Diemer Llewellyn, Jana Rape in feminist utopian and dystopian fiction: Joanna Russ’s “The Female Man”, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, and Octavia Bulter “The Parable of the Sower” and “The Parable of the Talents”.  Diss. Villanova University, 2006. ProQuest Digital Dissertations. ProQuest. 24 Feb. 2008    http://www.proquest.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/

The dissertation by Jana Diemer Llewellyn discusses how rape threatens women from being independent in society.  

 13. Jones, Esther L. Traveling Discourses Subjectivity, Space and Spirituality in Black Women’s Speculative Fictions in the Americas. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State  University, 2006.

The article discusses the way in which fiction that predict the future enables implications for black liberation by embracing differences and change.  

14. Ivey, Adriane Louise Rewriting Christianity: African American women writers and the Bible.  Diss. University of Oregon, 2000. ProQuest Digital Dissertations. ProQuest. 24 Feb. 2008 <http://www.proquest.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/>

This article describes how authors use the bible to show myths and how people of different races and gender are treated and the effect the myths have on the people

 15. Foster, Guy M. “”Do I Look Like Someone You Can Come Home to From Where  You May Be Going?”: Re-Mapping Interracial Anxiety in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.”  African American Review 41, no. 1 (2007): 143-164.

The article presents a literary criticism on Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” a book about African-American slavery and time-travel. It talks about how the black female-white male sexual relationship was unconventionally portrayed.

  16. Braid, Christina. “Contemplating and Contesting Violence in Dystopia: Violence in  Octavia Butler’S XENOGENESIS Trilogy.” Contemporary Justice Review 9 (2006): 47-65.

This article is about the modern understanding of violence. It talks about the complexity and reality of violence in the context of Octavia Butler’s trilogy, XENOGENESIS. It also talks about how the book presents challenges to justice today by portraying dystopian societies.

  17. Butler, Octavia E. Interview with Evette Porter. Essence 36, no. 6 Oct. 2005: 96.

This interview is about Octavia Butler’s “Fledging”. She talks about how it is different from her other novels because it involves vampire romances. She also talks about how marketing people and readers label her as a science fiction novelist.

 18. J Andrew Deman. “Taking Out the Trash: Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed and the Feminist Voice in American SF. ” Femspec  1 Dec. 2005: 6-14,148. GenderWatch (GW). ProQuest. 24 Feb. 2008 <http://www.proquest.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/>

This articles discusses how Octavia Butler uses strong female characters in each of her novels.  Also, most of her books use the theme or a variation of the theme which is the desire for independence and  autonomy.  

 19. Call, Lewis. “Structures of Desire: Erotic Power in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.” Rethinking History. 9.2/3 (2005): 275-96.

This article discusses the “erotic power” of consensual slavery in novels by Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. In addition, Call describes how non-consensual slavery has shaped our culture and how these authors attempt to overcome the past through their literature.

  20. Steinberg, Marc. “Inverting History in Octavia Butler’s Postmodern Slave Narrative.”African American Review. 38.3 (2004): 467-76.

Steinberg talks about Butler’s novel Kindred in this article. Butler’s way of writing about the relationship between past and present is closely looked at by Steinberg.

  21. DeGraw, Sharon. “”The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same”: Gender and Sexuality in Octavia Butler’s Oeuvre.” Femspec. 4.2 (2004): 219-38.

In this article, DeGraw explains how Butler creates “heroic” female characters, however she continues to examine how these heroes in reality exemplify traditional gender roles assigned to women. Gender is looked at in the Parable series, Patternmaster series, and Xenogenesis trilogy.

  22. Sands, Peter. “Octavia Butler’s Chiastic Cannibalistics.” Utopian Studies. 14.1 (2003): 1-14.

This article looks at cannibalism’s symbolic meaning in Octavia Butler’s novels.

  23. Mitchell, Angelyn. “Not enough of the past: feminist revisions of slavery in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.” MELUS. 26.3 (2001): 51-75.

Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is talked about this article. In particular, Mitchell examines how Butler revisits the history of slavery in the book.

   24. Raffel, Burton. “Genre to the rear, race and gender to the fore: the novels of Octavia E.         Butler.” The Literary Review (Madison, N.J.). 38 (1995): 453-61.

This article discusses how Octavia Butler’s work is beyond the genre of science fiction. Raffel talks about how Butler is captivating and insightful in her work. He believes that neither a man nor anyone other than African-American could have written what she has completed.

  25. Miller, Jim. “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision.”Science Fiction Studies 25.2 (1998): 336-360.

The article focuses on post-apocalyptic hoping in relation to fiction, and relates it to Octavia Butler’s literary work. It also talks about other books about this kind of hope and the tradition of feminist utopia in Butler’s work.

 26. Scott, Jonathan. “Octavia Butler and the Base for American Socialism.” Socialism and Democracy 20.3 (2006): 105 126.

The article is about African-American socialism and the transition from the current capitalist social relations of production to equalitarianism.

 27. Yaszek, Lisa. “”A Grim Fantasy”: Remaking American History in Octavia Butler’s

      Kindred.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 28.4 (2003): 1053-1067.

The article examines the Octavia Butler’s novel “Kindred”, as a memory machine that uses science fiction devices to re-present African-American women’s history. Yaszek also admires Butler’s portrayal of future worlds where technologies mediate race and gender.