In 2016, ten years after her death, Octavia E. Butler experienced a rebirth. Arguably, Butler, the best-known black woman science fiction writer, never disappeared: the Carl Brandon Society established in 2006 the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship to support writers of color at the Clarion and Clarion West workshops; Conseula Francis collected Butler’s interviews in Conversations with Octavia Butler in 2009; and the e-book Unexpected Stories, which makes available the previously unpublished “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder,” appeared in 2014. Additionally, two separate books of science fiction inspired by Butler materialized after her passing: Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler (Lecrivain 2014) and Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Movements (Imarisha and brown 2015).
Yet 2016 stands as an important year for Butler as well as for the writers and scholars inspired by her. In addition to the Octavia E. Butler Literary Society holding the first Butler-dedicated conference that February, the Los Angeles arts organization Clockshop—in conjunction with the Huntington and other cultural institutions—organized Radio Imagination, a yearlong celebration of everything Butler. Radio Imagination featured a Butler-themed contemporary art exhibition that ran from October 1, 2016, through January 7, 2017. Additionally, the project supported musicians, poets, and creative nonfiction writers in the production of their work and hosted legacy tours, film screenings, panel discussions, and readings (Clockshop). With dozens of contemporary artists, writers, and scholars bringing Butler-inspired texts into being, Radio Imagination and other Butler-centric productions continue to make Butler’s presence felt, allowing her to transcend time and space.
Transcendence and transformation additionally mark Butler’s oeuvre. Her science fiction deals with boundary crossings that inspire new—and often traumatic—forms of being. In several of her works, Butler uses historical imagery of the Middle Passage to convey physical as well as metaphysical shifts that extend beyond the past and into the present and future. In Wild Seed (1980), Anyanwu, an immortal shape shifter, makes the journey from Africa to colonial America in the company of Doro, an immortal body snatcher. While Anyanwu escapes slavery in Benin and becomes a reluctant slaver in what is now Nigeria, her Middle Passage experience with Doro marks her shift from subject to object. Like her kin on the ship and, later, the shore, Anyanwu faces Doro’s beatings, manipulations, and rapes. During their centuries together, Doro tells her, “You’ll only be in danger if you disobey me” and “Anyanwu, you must not leave me!” (Butler, Wild 271, 294), positioning Anyanwu as an object necessary for sustaining his humanity and agency. Although Anyanwu escapes Doro’s authority by turning herself into an animal, when she returns to human form she finds herself ruled by him much in the same way white slave traders and owners dominate her dark-skinned descendants.
Anyanwu’s Middle Passage experience—her travel from Africa to colonial New York aboard a slave ship—transforms the shape shifter. While Anyanwu can alter her body from female to male, young to old, and human to animal, the Middle Passage journey signals her conversion from self-possessed subject to Doro-directed object. The subject–object transition that occurs for the fictional Anyanwu mirrors that of historical captured Africans during the Middle Passage. Toni Morrison, Greg Tate, Calvin L. Warren, and Kodwo Eshun argue that the Middle Passage stands as the moment in history when black subjects became abstracted into metaphysical elements or objects (Gilroy, Small 178; Eshun, “Further” 297–98; Warren 237).1 As Warren asserts, “the literal destruction of black bodies” during and following the transatlantic slave voyage enables “the psychic, economic, and philosophical resources for modernity to objectify, forget, and ultimately obliterate Being” (237). With the Middle Passage standing in for the bar that, according to Tate, separates signifier from signified, the black body becomes “objectified, infused with exchange value, and rendered malleable within a sociopolitical order” of white power (Eshun, “Further” 297–98; Warren 226, 237).
In order to recognize and overcome the abstraction of black bodies and identities that began with the Middle Passage, new types of consciousness must be developed. If W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness describes the ability to recognize the black body’s signification in white culture, and Frantz Fanon’s triple consciousness marks an awareness of the move from black subject to black object within this system, then the multiple consciousness of black posthumanism and Afrofuturism assists the black individual in viewing the self from outside the system of signification altogether. Eshun asserts that the “triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness” of Afrofuturism makes the black subject privy to “previously inaccessible alienations” (“Further” 298). Eshun’s “previously inaccessible alienations” correspond to the abstraction of blackness since the Middle Passage, the positioning of the sign of blackness within the ontology and cosmology of white power. Like Afrofuturism’s triple or quadruple consciousness, black posthumanism’s multiple consciousness allows the subject to understand and potentially surmount this alienation. Viewing identity as part of but separate from the system of signification corresponds with the posthuman imperative to blur dividing lines but celebrate distinctions between temporalities and subjectivities, an imperative reflected in posthuman constructions of identity and solidarity.
Transformative Middle Passage experiences in Butler’s science fiction cultivate a posthuman multiple consciousness that allows characters and readers to recognize blackness both within and outside of the ontology and cosmology of white power. As Nadine Flagel argues, “Much speculative fiction is explicitly or implicitly engaged with issues of slavery and freedom, possession and liberation, but divorces these issues from the material conditions of slavery” (224). While Butler features literal and metaphorical Middle Passages in several of her works, including Wild Seed (as mentioned above), Dawn (1987), and “Bloodchild” (1984), in the novel Kindred (1979) Butler directly acknowledges the material conditions of slavery that, as Flagel points out, speculative and science fiction authors all-too-often ignore. Butler’s use of time travel in the neo–slave narrative Kindred compels her African American protagonist, Dana Franklin, to undergo alienating notions of racial identity in the past, present, and future. Dana’s Middle Passage experiences aid her development of a posthuman multiple consciousness through which she recognizes both temporality and subjectivity as liminal. Although Warren and Eshun argue that black subjectivity exists only in the past—prior to the Middle Passage—and Warren warns that the achievement of black subjectivity in the future would mean the end of blackness as we know it (Eshun, “Further” 298; Warren 244), Dana, as a possessor of posthuman multiple consciousness, resides within a liminal temporality and, as such, understands that black subjectivity exists in those places accepted as well as those denied: the past, present, and future.
Additionally, Butler’s posthumously published “A Necessary Being” (2014) models posthuman multiple consciousness for readers who may otherwise struggle to view any racial identity as distinct from white supremacy. By depicting power relations in a world unlike ours, Butler enables her readers to understand races and cultures as connected to but differentiated from one another. Specifically, in “A Necessary Being” Butler presents readers with the familiar concept of hierarchies based on skin color, yet through her character development, she dismisses the subsumption of one race under another. Butler’s otherworldly protagonist, a blue-fleshed female named Tahneh, sees herself as part of and also distinct from the Kohn culture in which she exists, paradoxically, as both ruler and slave. By considering power systems in this alien environment—an environment distinct from white, Western cosmologies—readers can join Tahneh in cultivating a posthuman multiple consciousness and acknowledging new ways of understanding both self and other identities.
The Middle Passage commences a series of psychological, physical, and on-tological shifts for captured Africans. Aboard ships and on soil, women, men, and children experience a violence that literally and figuratively disrupts black subjectivity. Valérie Loichot asserts, “The slave family is marked by a series of amputations: an immense and abrupt severing from original African roots and memory; a dismemberment of family units by practices of kidnapping or selling; literal amputations of limbs of fugitive slaves; splits between bodies turned into economic tools of production and mind; substitution of mothering and fathering by breeding; and attempted disassociation of humanity from black subjects” (41). The Middle Passage alters not only black communities and bodies in the past but also black identities in the present. The effects of enslavement on the form and concept of blackness—as Loichot says, the relationship between black subjectivity and humanity—means that the Middle Passage shapes historical and contemporary ideas of race.
Theorizing the Middle Passage extends the transatlantic slave trade beyond the four centuries of trauma that triangulated Africa, Europe, and the Americas. For instance, Morrison finds that Middle Passage dislocations foreshadow modernist alienations (Gilroy, Small 178). Tate extends these Middle Passage dislocations to the field of semiotics, arguing that the Middle Passage operates as the bar between signifier and signified (Eshun, “Further” 297–98). Warren furthers Tate’s semiotic approach, asserting that the meaninglessness of signification following the Middle Passage institutes a black nihilism. And Eshun “reroutes” the alien abductions of the Middle Passage through contemporary Afrofuturist science fictions in order to offer alternative histories and futures (“Further” 300). Each of these theorists marks the Middle Passage as both a defining, centuries-long moment in history as well as an experience that exceeds the specific time period during which it occurs. Moreover, each theorist recognizes that during and following the Middle Passage, constructions of blackness develop in opposition to, yet support of, whiteness.
Theories of black identity provide concrete examples of the paradoxical opposition to and support of white power structures cultivated by constructions of blackness since the Middle Passage. Du Bois’s double consciousness describes the internalization of both black- and white-determined ideas of blackness. He explains that the black subject inhabits “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (Du Bois 38). The “other world”—the white world—views the black subject with “amused contempt and pity,” which Du Bois argues compels the black subject to observe himself similarly (38). Du Bois’s black subject, though situated in opposition to the “other world” of the white subject, supports white power structures with his “longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self” (39)—a self determined by or at least incorporating white-authored notions of humanity.
Du Bois describes a system of signification in which whiteness shapes the cultural significance of blackness. Although his assertion of a double consciousness suggests the existence of a “Negro” consciousness distinct from a white “American” consciousness (Du Bois 38), white supremacy shapes both entities. Rejecting the mutual exclusivity of blackness and whiteness in Du Boisian double consciousness, Paul Gilroy argues that Du Bois’s theory acknowledges the “transformation and fragmentation of the integral racial self,” indicating that although ideas of blackness vary across black communities, “constricting or absolutist understandings of ethnicity” driven by white power structures limit the expression of black humanity (Black 138). As Gilroy asserts, Du Bois’s “two warring ideals” have “democratic potential disfigured by white supremacy” (Du Bois 38; Gilroy, Black 113); in other words, whiteness, by cultivating meaning through the opposition of blackness, distorts blackness for blacks and whites.
Fanon similarly addresses the supremacy of white power structures in shaping ideas about blackness. However, whereas Du Bois posits a double consciousness, Fanon contends that blacks possess a “triple” personhood or consciousness. Like Du Bois, Fanon argues that the black individual exists as a subject and also in relation to the white other. Fanon then adds a third element: via the relation to the white other, the black individual loses subjectivity and occupies object status (84). Fanon expresses his desire to “be a man among other men,” but he concludes that he has “made [himself] an object”—the third aspect of his triple consciousness—because “his inferiority comes into being through the other” (85, 83). Fanon’s triple consciousness thus offers blacks not only a vision of black and white notions of blackness, as Du Bois’s double consciousness does, but also a glimpse of the “other,” the larger white power structure that shapes rhetorical concepts of race.
Despite labeling white supremacist systems as “other,” neither Du Bois nor Fanon argues that blackness influences whiteness in the same way whiteness distorts blackness. Rejecting the equal reflexivity of blackness and whiteness, Fanon assigns triple consciousness specifically to black men and women:
Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that did not know and that imposed itself on him.(82–83)
Diana Fuss explains that for Fanon, whiteness operates as a “transcendental signifier,” a “self-identical, self-reproducing term” that proclaims freedom from blackness as well as “the very category of ‘race’” (22). Fuss follows Fanon in asserting that whiteness, in mandating independence from racial categories, colonizes blackness and reserves subjectivity for whites alone (Fuss 23).
If white power structures regulate the rhetoric of race and the assignation of subjectivity, then blackness—even in its opposition to whiteness—supports white supremacy. Semiotics—what Warren calls the “very structure of meaning in the modern world”—depends upon the existence of blackness and, specifically, the othering of blackness, which takes the concrete form of “anti-black violence” during and following the Middle Passage (226). While Du Bois and Fanon explain through their theories of double and triple consciousness that antiblack violence exists as a byproduct of white supremacist systems, Warren positions black suffering as foundational to semiotics and Western metaphysics (237–38): “If literal black bodies sustain modernity and metaphysics—though various forms of captivity, terror, and subjection,” he asks, “then what would emancipation entail for blacks? How do we allow metaphysics to self-consume and weaken when blackness nourishes metaphysics?” (Warren 239). Warren follows Morrison in interweaving the origins of modernity and black oppression, though he extends her premise by arguing that historical and contemporary American culture depends on antiblack violence.
Warren’s black nihilist philosophy provides no answer to the problem of black suffering within white power structures; however, his argument that blackness contributes to the perpetuation of these structures indicates the need for a new type of consciousness: one that not only recognizes the impact of whiteness on black subjectivity (like Du Bois’s double consciousness) and black metaphysics (like Fanon’s triple consciousness) but also acknowledges the reflexive relationship of blackness and whiteness within white supremacist systems. Posthuman multiple consciousness affords this perspective. Posthuman multiple consciousness perceives black identities as contributing to but also potentially independent of white, Western metaphysics. In particular, considering identity within the temporal liminality of posthumanism allows the black subject to conceive of a future in which blackness destroys rather than facilitates black objectification. While Warren argues that this type of “‘blackened’ world” would put an “end to metaphysics” and “the world itself” (244), posthumanism projects non-apocalyptic possibilities for the future as well as the past and present.
When read through the lens of posthuman multiple consciousness, black science fiction—including Afrofuturist texts concerning the oppression of black identities and objectification of black bodies in the past, present, or future—promotes the existence of black subjectivity throughout time. Eshun asserts that Afrofuturism relies on “extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and the constitution of Black Atlantic subjectivities: from slave to negro to coloured to evolué to black to African to African American” (“Further” 298–99). Black science fiction’s alien abductions mirror the black subject’s real-world alienations in historical and contemporary white power structures. However, in addition to engaging with the past and present, black science fiction texts blend these time periods with the future to create a liminal temporality. By disrupting “the linear time of progress” and “the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory”—the time before the Middle Passage and slavery—black science fiction presents “a series of powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates” (Eshun, “Further” 297). Reading black science fiction through posthuman multiple consciousness shows that although the Middle Passage strips captured Africans of subjectivity, as Tate, Warren, and Eshun assert, the texts’ liminal temporality brings black subjectivity into the present and future.
In her science fictional neo–slave narrative Kindred, Butler makes posthuman liminality literal through the depiction of time travel. Middle Passage experiences take Butler’s characters not across the ocean but through time and space. Dana, Butler’s African American protagonist, journeys between 1976 California, her present, and antebellum Maryland, her ancestral past. Even Dana’s first trip back to 1811 or 1812 engages with the temporal, spatial, and subjective shifts indicative of the Middle Passage experience. On June 9, 1976—her twenty-sixth birthday—Dana feels “dizzy, nauseated” while organizing books in her new home with her husband, Kevin (Butler, Kindred 13). Dana’s books, house, and husband “blur” into nonexistence as trees, a river, and a drowning child come into view (Kindred 13). Present changes to past, indoors to outdoors, and friend to foe—though Dana does not yet understand her fraught relationship with the white child, Rufus—during her voyage from 1976 to the 1810s. While these shifts seem like the direct exchange of opposites, Butler blurs not only Dana’s vision but also the binaries. For instance, Dana draws upon her knowledge of artificial respiration from the present (or the future, considering the perspective of antebellum Dana) to save the child in the past (or the present, again keeping in mind Dana’s antebellum point of view). Accordingly, seemingly distinct periods and places overlap for Dana not only during her Middle Passage travels between present and past but also during her time in each temporality.
Kindred’s liminality allows both Butler’s protagonist and her readers to consider race, and, in particular, blackness, within and outside of specific cosmologies of white power. The novel depicts the implications of Dana’s blackness during both her personal present and her familial past. As a black woman in 1976, Dana faces racial bigotry and sexual harassment. Her co-worker murmurs, “Chocolate and vanilla porn!” when seeing her with Kevin, who is white, and Kevin’s sister and brother-in-law as well as Dana’s uncle object to the news of their interracial relationship (Kindred 56, 110). Although the novel suggests that Dana and Kevin have a happy and healthy marriage, 1970s gender roles relegate Dana to a subordinate position: both Dana and Kevin identify as writers, but Kevin, the “primary breadwinner” (Parham 1322), asks Dana to type his manuscripts. Similarly, Dana notes that after moving into their new house, Kevin leaves her to finish unpacking, since he “had stopped when he got his office in order” (Kindred 12). In both situations, Kevin changes his behavior after he recognizes Dana’s discomfort, but Dana, and not Kevin, seeks reconciliation after their fights, and she makes excuses for Kevin’s behavior. For example, Dana thinks that the “look” Kevin gives her in response to a passive-aggressive comment is not “as malevolent as it seem[s]” and that he would try “to intimidate […] [s]trangers” but not her (Kindred 13). Considering these power imbalances, Marc Steinberg argues that Dana and Kevin’s relationship “smacks of a kind of servitude,” and the “line between slavery and marriage” becomes “blurred” as the novel continues (469). As Dana finds herself beholden to others—including her husband—both in the present and past, the influence of white power structures on black subjectivity becomes apparent to readers.
Late-twentieth-century conventions of race and gender intersect with early nineteenth-century customs when Kevin follows Dana through time to the antebellum Upper South. After Rufus meets Kevin and asks the white man, “Does Dana belong to you now?” Kevin affirms the boy’s suspicion: “In a way,” he answers. “She’s my wife” (Kindred 60). The intolerance Dana and Kevin experience as an interracial couple in 1976 likewise returns, anachronistically speaking, in 1819, with Rufus, first, denying the plausibility of their relationship and, second, asserting its illegality. Rufus again conveys the period’s white supremacist and patriarchal views when, near the end of the novel, he asks Dana to take the place of Alice—his unwilling wife and Dana’s great-great-grandmother—as his lover. Lisa Yaszek notes, “The bargain seems perfectly reasonable to Rufus—after all, Dana and Alice are nearly identical doubles of one another, and black women are supposed to accede to the wishes of white men” (“Grim” 1063). Dana’s performance as a slave during her time in Maryland exposes her to the physical and emotional violence born of black women’s object status.
While Dana’s position as a black woman within a white power structure shifts as she moves throughout time, her objectification persists. Steinberg asserts that Butler “assumes a non-Western conceptualization of history—one in which history is cyclical, not linear—in order to demonstrate ways in which certain forms of race and gender oppression continue late into the twentieth century and beyond” (467). Steinberg’s argument about racism, when broadened to considerations of race in general, reveals that the temporal liminality in Kindred incorporates a subjective liminality: blackness—in relation to and distinct from whiteness and, in particular, white supremacy—holds historical as well as trans-temporal significance. Although Warren argues that the fantasy of political progress, represented by a linear time line extending into the future of improved race relations, “allows one to disregard the historicity of anti-blackness and its continued legacy” (221), Butler’s novel uses liminality rather than linearity to acknowledge white supremacy in the past, present, and future.
Specifically, Dana’s temporal and subjective liminality imbue her with a posthuman multiple consciousness through which she situates blackness within and outside of white power structures. During her second peregrination between past and present, Dana meets a white patroller who attempts to rape her. Dana’s fear propels her forward—or back—to the future, where she finds herself “kicking” and “clawing” Kevin, whom she mistakes for the patroller (Kindred 43). Kevin never physically threatens Dana in the novel, but his whiteness—when considered from her new, temporally liminal perspective—endangers her. Lauren J. Lacey asserts, “Dana has had to become a different kind of subject in order to see herself through the eyes of a white male patroller in the past, and the transition to the present is not particularly simple. Kevin’s status as a white male is newly complicated for Dana by her experiences in the past” (75). In discussing Dana observing herself “through the eyes of a white male patroller,” Lacey acknowledges Dana’s multiple consciousness: Dana believes herself to be a subject, but when considering that the patroller views her as a body to be used, exchangeable for any of the other black female bodies she’s “just like” (Kindred 42), she understands her object status. Loichot similarly acknowledges Dana’s awareness of her object position, noting that “Dana realizes two important things at once. Her own name and body disappear under the function of the female slave, sexualized object at the mercy of the white master” (44). Dana’s knowledge of her subordinate status in the past shapes her view of herself and others in the present when she attacks her husband upon her return to California. She positions blackness within the ontology of whiteness in the past as well as the present when she brings the historicity of her object status into her life with her husband.
However, posthuman multiple consciousness not only positions blackness within the ontology of whiteness but also provides a view of blackness divorced from white supremacy. Dana’s subjectivity, when considered within the Middle Passage timeline suggested by Tate, Warren, and Eshun, shifts throughout Kindred. Specifically, time travel allows her to simultaneously possess and be denied the subjectivity of Middle Passage prehistory. If, as Eshun argues, black subjectivity exists only in “prehistory”—before the Middle Passage—then the existence of time travel in Kindred means that Dana can neither claim nor be denied subjectivity at any point in the story: her prehistory, like her present and future, is ubiquitous (Eshun, “Further” 297). According to Lacey, temporal liminality in the novel shapes Dana’s understanding of herself: “Butler uses the device of time travel to create a narrative that absolutely refuses to see past and present as discrete, closed off, or even formal categories. Dana’s life—her home, her life with her husband—are caught up in the demand to see the relationship between past and present as mutually constitutive. Throughout the novel, Butler emphasizes how difficult it is for Dana to ‘leave the past behind’” (73). Indeed, Dana cannot “leave the past behind” because she always already inhabits the past: each Middle Passage venture takes Dana to a tripartite temporality. After her initial trip to the antebellum Upper South, Dana’s travels to Maryland place her in a future-past—a past more recent than that of her previous visit—which becomes her present. Similarly, Dana’s return to the “normalcy” of 1976 California situates her in a future-present—a present more recent than the one she left—which, considering the physical and emotional toll time travel exacts upon her, becomes part of her past. While the historical Middle Passage takes place during Dana’s ancestral past, her personal Middle Passage experiences occur in the past, present, and future; accordingly, her “prehistory,” her pre–Middle Passage subjectivity, simultaneously occurs within and exceeds all three temporalities.
However, Kindred’s temporal liminality means that Dana’s post–Middle Passage objectification simultaneously occurs within and exceeds past, present, and future. If, as Tate argues, the Middle Passage marks the moment of the black subject’s abstraction and objectification—that is, “the bar between signifier and the signified could be understood as standing for the Middle Passage that separated signification (meaning) from sign (letter)” (Eshun, “Further” 297)—then the final chapter of Butler’s novel gives the bar physical and spatial significance. During her last trip to the past, Dana stabs Rufus to prevent him from raping her. Simultaneously with Rufus’s death, Dana experiences the “terrible, wrenching sickness” of her Middle Passage travels between past and present (Kindred 260). Despite her weakened state, she manages to move Rufus’s body off of hers before she travels through time, but his hand remains on her arm. Recounting the process of her return to 1976, Dana reports: “Something harder and stronger than Rufus’s hand clamped down on my arm, squeezing it, stiffening it, pressing into it—painlessly, at first—melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm were being absorbed into something. Something cold and nonliving” (Kindred 260–61). The “cold and nonliving” force that grasps Dana’s arm and divides her body, permanently, between past and present corresponds to the bar in the system of signification, the bar of the Middle Passage. This bar, which indicates the separation of signifier and signified and, in this instance, the distance between the physical black body and cultural constructions of blackness, transforms Dana’s arm—her body—into an object consumed by Rufus in 1831 and her wall in 1976.
Dana, thus, experiences not only temporal liminality but also subjective liminality: her pre–Middle Passage subjectivity exists throughout time, just as her post–Middle Passage objectification surpasses the limits of linear temporality. Time travel makes impossible the separation of past, present, and future states of being. Considering the relationship between temporality and identity, Lacey asserts that Dana “literally becomes a multiple subject, defined in and through both the past and the present” (72). Additionally, the future—which cannot be separated from other temporalities in the novel—defines Dana. For instance, Butler’s novel, and Dana’s story, begins at the end, after Dana returns to 1976 for the last time, without her left arm. While Lisa Long argues that in killing Rufus, Dana “literally kills her past” (470), and Lacey asserts that with Dana losing an arm, “History has taken a piece of Dana’s body” (72), the past remains alive for Dana, and the past, along with the present and future, permanently alters her identity. As such, Butler’s novel draws a comparison between the blurred boundaries of time and being.
This liminal temporality and subjectivity accords with a posthuman multiple consciousness that makes possible an understanding of blackness in relation to the history of white supremacy and also beyond that history. Although Dana finds herself, like other black women, men, and children, oppressed regardless of the time period she inhabits, Butler’s temporal and subjective disturbances indicate not the inevitability of antiblack violence but the potential for black freedom, including the freedom from the “transcendental signifier” of whiteness (Fuss 22). Steinberg argues that by depicting time as a circle or “zigzag,” “Butler creates an historical possibility of the perception of self (and how it might be affected by matters of possession and ownership)” (472, 475). In addition to inspiring perceptions of the self as determined by dominating forces, liminal temporality encourages Butler’s characters and readers to acknowledge subjectivities free from domination as well.
With his black nihilist theory, Warren presents the possibility of blackness as distinct from whiteness, although he positions both the achievement and product of this altered state of being as beyond comprehension. Considering, first, the dismantling of white supremacist systems, Warren rejects historical strategies for emancipation, arguing that “every emancipatory strategy that attempted to rescue blackness from anti-blackness inevitably reconstituted and reconfigured the anti-blackness it tried to eliminate” (239). Likewise, he dismisses future-focused solutions, since the promise of a more egalitarian future only promotes the continuation of struggle (Warren 233). In his philosophy of black nihilism, Warren advocates for the rejection of political action in the present as a tactic through which to separate black identity from the American Dream and Western metaphysics. He states, “Black nihilism demands a traversal, but not the traversal that reintegrates ‘the subject’ (and Being) back into society by shattering fundamental fantasies of metaphysics, but a traversal that disables and invalidates every imaginative and symbolic function” (240). “Because anti-blackness infuses itself into every fabric of social existence,” Warren asserts, positioning the black subject outside of white supremacist systems “becomes something like death for the world,” which makes sense, if, as he argues, divorcing the black subject from white supremacy “disables and invalidates every imaginative and symbolic function” we know (239, 240). Nevertheless, Warren pushes for a black nihilism that resists statements of purpose or progress, a nihilism that seeks to destroy white supremacy by denying the resuscitation of the past and the hope for the future that have, unwittingly, maintained the systems they seek to move beyond.
Yet temporality proves as slippery in Warren’s “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope” as it does Butler’s Kindred. Despite Warren’s explicit rejection of “[p]rogress” and “futurity” (218), his philosophy fails to extricate itself from the language of Western metaphysics and, specifically, ideas of linear temporality: he must provide background and arrive, despite his protestations, at a “point” by the end of the article (243). However, Warren acknowledges the impossibility of his project: he gets as close to articulating a nonlinear theory of black nihilism—a theory that “does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it”—as semiotics and the conventions of academic writing allow (244). If, as Warren acknowledges, we cannot yet articulate or perhaps even imagine a reconfigured hope, then perhaps the key to freedom lies not in the rejection of temporality but the embrace of it. For instance, if we should not dismiss black suffering by simply hoping for a future more empowering than our present, why should we dismiss emancipation projects by anticipating a future as oppressive as our present? In the tradition of Du Bois and Fanon, who introduce ideas of liminal subjectivity that posthumanists have now applied to all individuals, regardless of race, and Eshun, who considers liminal temporality and subjectivity together, the theory of posthuman blackness provides a view of black subjectivity related to but also distinct from the linear trajectories of Western metaphysics.
Articulating a multiple consciousness rooted in posthumanism that allows for a view of blackness as connected to but discrete from white supremacy proves difficult. Because the posthuman lines of connection that link the subject to other people, periods, and powers undergo constant transformation, the subject exists in a continual state of development. Thus, while historical and contemporary white supremacies shape the black subject—and, as posthumanism necessitates and Warren corroborates, the black subject shapes white supremacies—the systems and the subject must be recognized as separate from one another. Posthuman multiple consciousness, such as that introduced by Eshun and explicated here, describes the ability to recognize the relationship between individual entities as well as the fluid nature of the relationship and the entities themselves. Theoretically this consciousness exists; however, can we imagine blackness, whiteness, or any identity divorced from white supremacy, when white supremacy shapes all that we know? If we can, we must turn away from what we know in order to achieve this posthuman multiple consciousness. By considering power relations in worlds outside of ours—such as the alien environment of Butler’s “A Necessary Being” (2014)—we can envision and, perhaps, attain the impossible: the recognition of racial connection but rejection of racial subsumption.
“A Necessary Being” exists as both one of Butler’s first and last neo–slave narratives, given that she wrote the novella early in her career but her estate published the text after her death in 2006. The story “depicts a crucial event in the backstory of her disavowed novel Survivor” (1978): the coming together of two alien tribes (Canavan). Set in an alternative world populated by the Kohn, “A Necessary Being” addresses the physical and emotional toll of captivity on members of the Hao, a rare ruling class revered by the Kohn for their perceived ability to “assure the people of good luck, fulfillment of their needs.” While the Hao people’s brilliant blue skin gives them power over all decisions in their Kohn communities, they have no authority over the rules of succession. K. Tempest Bradford explains that in the novella, “leadership is biologically determined and leaders are utterly necessary to the proper functioning of society, even when they are unwilling and forced into it.” Accordingly, when in need of a new Hao leader, the Kohn steal a Hao from another region and cripple the Hao to limit the possibility of escape from the Kohn community: another instance of a Middle Passage. However, Butler’s protagonist in “A Necessary Being,” Tahneh, escapes this immobilization by being born of a crippled Hao and reared in the desert Rohkohn community. Tahneh’s indoctrination makes her loyal to the desert people, but her inability to produce a suitably blue heir leads to the inciting incident of the novella: the capture and Middle Passage transport of Diut, the Hao of the mountain Tehkohn.
Similarities and differences exist between the alien world of Butler’s novella and the “New World” of the Americas created by slavery and colonialism (Glissant 160; Wynter, “Beyond” 643). Loichot notes that in Butler’s science fiction, she often “imagines a postterrestrial world to move beyond racial difference” (49). Yet rather than creating a “post-racial humanity,” which Loichot identifies in Butler’s earlierpublished texts (50), Butler develops in “A Necessary Being” a hyperracial world featuring extraterrestrial elements that disallow easy parallels between Kohn and human societies. While in the story skin color accords with varying levels of societal power, which parallels racism and colorism in the Americas, blue, yellow, and green skin and chameleonlike camouflage differentiate Hao and Kohn bodies from human bodies. Although Butler “addresses race and class head-on as well as in metaphorical terms” (Bradford), she also confounds contemporary hierarchies with her portrayal of the alien species: the unique “pure blue” flesh of the Hao grants them leader status, but their flesh also marks them as slaves to the Kohn. Because the Kohn revere the Hao as leaders but also subject them to violence and captivity, neither Kohn nor Hao beings occupy a power position like that of whites in white supremacist societies.
The dissimilarity of Kohn and American cultures allows Butler’s readers to understand the Hao both in relation to and separate from the Kohn who place them in captivity, even if this posthuman multiple consciousness may be more difficult when considering social ties—and, specifically, race relations—in America. The novella’s protagonist models multiple consciousness for Butler’s readers. Tahneh understands how the Kohn see her, and she works to meet their expectations. For example, when a hunter expresses pride in representing his caste well, the narrator notes that Tahneh’s body “whited and became slightly luminescent” as “a sign of the approval that she should have felt, but did not feel.” Later, Tahneh rejects her “impulse to let her own body whiten with pleasure” when she achieves a political goal, knowing that to do so would make her fellow Hao, Diut, look weak to members of his Kohn community. Tahneh’s knowledge of her desired actions and her decision to behave otherwise show that, one, she understands what the Kohn presume of the Hao (leadership and devotion) and, two, she exists both within and outside of these conventions.
Beyond demonstrating a double or triple consciousness that allows her to recognize her body’s signification in Kohn culture and her awareness of her move from subject to object in this system, Tahneh achieves a posthuman multiple consciousness with which she can understand herself as outside of not only Kohn conventions but also the Kohn system of signification. Warren argues that only by working outside of white cosmologies does black emancipation become possible, since efforts for freedom made within the white supremacist systems merely reinforce those systems. If, as Audre Lorde states, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (112), then Butler and other black women writers must “enlist the tools of power, books, pen” and “write history in which the former master/father is turned powerless” (Loichot 47). In “A Necessary Being,” freedom—specifically, Hao liberation from threats of abduction and violence—can only be achieved through the destruction of the Kohn system of signification.
Initially, though, Tahneh and Diut appear to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. In order to prevent Diut’s capture, Tahneh uses her influence to persuade her Rohkohn community and Diut, as well as his two Tehkohn compatriots, to join tribes rather than continue the tradition of fighting for Hao leaders. She states, “Diut, if we’re superior people at all, we should be able to find a way to stop [your crippling or death] from happening.” Despite the tradition of Hao being left out of succession discussions, Tahneh assures him, “My people will do what I tell them. Exactly what I tell them,” and, as she predicts, the Rohkohn agree to move to the mountains with the Tehkohn. Tahneh and Diut work within the system by assuming the leadership positions bestowed upon them by the Kohn and using their power to alter the rules that have stood for generations.
However, in addition to wielding the master’s tools, the Hao convey their awareness that changing tradition overlaps with the disintegration of Kohn metaphysics. During her efforts to bring together Rohkohn and Tehkohn, Tahneh notices her Kohn leaders being persuaded by her argument: “Tahneh had been waiting for this. It was an expression of the kind of belief, the kind of faith that made the people consider the Hao so essential. The Hao were supposed to possess some special ability to bring good to their people. It was not just that they tried to give good government, promote unity. Their mere presence was supposed to assure the people of good luck, fulfillment of their needs. Why else would a captive Hao, a bitter cripple, be better than no Hao at all?” Tahneh’s assertion that the Hao “were supposed to possess” (emphasis mine) a unique quality associated with unity and luck reveals her disbelief in the signified meaning of blue flesh. She situates her view of herself and other Hao leaders outside of the Kohn system of signification.
Diut similarly disregards Kohn ideas of Hao power by positioning Hao superiority as constructed rather than essential. Faced with Tahneh’s idea to join their tribes, Diut “visualize[s] himself before his council of judges,” seeking their approval rather than giving them orders. Later, when learning that Tahneh intends for him to serve as a “hostage among the Rohkohn that would ensure Rohkohn safe passage” to the mountain lands, Diut again sets aside his leadership position. While Tahneh hopes he will respond to the news of his hostage status by affirming her orders with his people, Diut flashes yellow—the color of “anger” but also submission—and acknowledges, within earshot of the Tehkohn, Tahneh’s distrust of him and his people. Diut conveys the anger and fear felt by his captured Tehkohn friends rather than the superiority modeled by Tahneh. By demonstrating kinship with the Tehkohn, Diut weakens the transcendental signifier of Hao power and dismisses Kohn ontology.
Of course, as a “prequel to” or “deleted scene from” Survivor (Canavan), “A Necessary Being” exceeds the temporality in which Butler sets the story. Like Kindred, then, the ramifications of power hierarchies continue into the present and future: Tahneh and Diut fail to produce a Hao heir and find other Kohn and, later, human mates, and the merged Rohkohn and Tehkohn face Garkohn invasions (Canavan). As Gerry Canavan asserts in his review of the story, “those who have actually read Survivor […] will recognize the characteristically Butlerian sour note” to the “very traditional sort of ‘happy ending’” of “A Necessary Being.” However, the shifting tenor of the novella, when considered in the context of the novel, does not diminish the multiple consciousness displayed within the text. While a starred review of the collection in Kirkus Reviews states that Tahneh “considers if [the Kohn] or the Hao are her true people,” Butler rejects an easy binary; instead, Tahneh and Diut see themselves both as connected to and distinct from the Kohn. The Hao neither rule over the Kohn, projecting their subjects as inferior, nor see themselves as beholden to Kohn superiors. Instead, Middle Passage experiences in the story, including the move of Hao leaders from one region to another and, more significantly, Tahneh and Diut’s shift from enemies to allies, foster for the Hao a posthuman multiple consciousness that situates Hao identity within and outside of the ontology of Kohn power.
Tahneh and Diut’s demonstration of posthuman multiple consciousness provides a path by which readers might discover a new way of thinking about being. Warren argues that the end of antiblack violence requires “a traversal that disables and invalidates every imaginative and symbolic function” (240). Posthuman multiple consciousness might be that traversal—a crossing that can heal some of the wounds of the original Middle Passage—and science fiction gives readers strategies for achieving a multiple consciousness that crosses boundary lines and imagines new systems. As James Gunn and Karen Hellekson assert, science fiction functions as “the literature of change” because of its concern with that which is new, whether “new problems to deal with or new perspectives on old problems” (x). Otherworldly or alien texts, including Butler’s Wild Seed, Kindred, and “A Necessary Being”—as well as more traditional fictions that contain speculative elements, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991)—allow readers to consider alternative routes by which to address not only the “old problems” of the past but also those old problems that persist into the present. In these works, liminal temporalities and subjectivities come together to provide a posthuman perspective of our world. If, as Eshun argues, “The future is a much better guide to the present than the past” (More 00[–001]), then perhaps the alien is a much better guide to the human than we are ourselves.