Octavia E. Butler: H Is for Horse

An homage to the childhood genius of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Bringing to view a selection of Butler’s unpublished writings and drawings, this book traces her fascination with human-alien symbiosis to her early empathy with horses and other marginalized creatures.

The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler’s development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena. She persistently re-visited and revised her early writings on teenage angst, Martians, Westerns, and racial politics. In one way or another her supernatural characters defied the constraints of gender, race, and class with equine-inflected resilience.

In the spirit of Butler’s passion for library research, this book is comprised of twenty-six short A-Z chapters, on vocabulary, images, and themes central to her authorial formation. It is part childhood biography, art and literary analysis, and memoir. It interweaves the author’s personal recollections with scholarly musings on poetry, film, and literature inspired by Butler’s encyclopedic reading habits and experiments with genre. Just as cross-species kinships are at the heart of her Afro-futurist, eco-feminist storytelling, Butler demonstrates that coming-of-age is an ongoing process and key to healing our damaged planet.

Chi-ming Yang, Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Chi-ming Yang is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in histories of race, empire, and East-West cultural exchanges. Her first book, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England (2011), analyzes the early China-mania that overtook European consumers of literature and luxury goods. Over the past decade, her scholarship has explored the politics and aesthetics of chinoiserie, as well as cross-species encounters in poetry and art. Her recent publications on blackness, abolition, and Atlantic slavery have appeared in Early American Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, British Art Studies, and The Journal of the Walters Art Museum.