ABSTRACT
The importance of issues of social justice and the creation of a new world on the ruins of the old has made Octavia E. Butler’s work an important point of reference for other writers and critics. Butler’s tale of a disintegrating world begins in the early 2020s, at a time of climate crisis and the ensuing economic and social turmoil “that journalists have begun to refer to as ‘the Apocalypse’ or more commonly, more bitterly, ‘the Pox’”. The United States is ravaged by starvation, disease, drug damage, and mob rule. Braidotti’s concept of a community built around vulnerability and hope relies on the recognition of the interdependence of humans and multiple others, in particular non-anthropocentric others. The acknowledgement of ontological relationality may create a “sustainable ethics” for subjects that are “non-unitary” and capable of moving beyond their self-interest, and may produce “an enlarged sense of community, which includes one’s territorial or environmental interconnections”.
