Seeding a Black Feminist Future on the Horizon of a Third Reconstruction: The Abolitionist Politics of Self-Care in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Abstract

ABSTRACT Entering the discussion of the current political climate as a possible “Third Reconstruction,” this article reads Octavia E. Butler’s recent New York Times bestselling novel, Parable of the Sower, to re-center the fugitive politics that brought about the first Reconstruction in the long struggle for Black liberation and engender what I am calling an abolitionist politics of self-care. Butler’s main character, Lauren Oya Olamina, operates as literary archive that brings together an initial canon of Black feminist intellectual visionaries, each of whom contributed to the long project of Reconstruction, and provides tangible practices for abolition democracy steeped in an attentiveness to interdependence and sustainability, all ecological, emotional, and political.