This piece is part of a series of essays from artist Kandis Williams on Octavia Butler. Williams is the 2020 Mohn Award recipient and her publication with the Hammer Museum will be released Winter 2026.
Joy James argues that Afrofuturism “channels factual horror into the imaginative future” and uses the trauma of enslaved and exploited bodies to envision a Black future that rejects colonial narratives. Therefore, Afrofuturism serves as a tool for reimagination, countering a long history in which Black life and creativity have been relegated to the “scrapings of myth.” James addresses Butler’s narrative method of peeling back layers, inviting the notion of a sliding door. The Black female protagonist provides “mirrors”—where the marginalized see themselves in narratives; “windows”—where the normative look into worlds that overlap their own; and “sliding glass doors” that permit passage—a transmission from lived experience to literary device. James notes that “Butler’s words allow the births of other species, create protagonists with identities that cannot be usurped by an alien, android minor character, love interest, or Black male lead.” I would challenge this notion, not in its analysis, but regarding the effect of opening such doors in the imaginative space of transubjective exchange, where the mirror reflection, the window, and the sliding door provide critical entry points to understanding Black interiority for non-black audiences painfully complicit in white supremacist oppression. This approach dissects and fractures it, lending a metaphysical sublime that can accelerate and underpin fascist ideologies at their core. Silently, in the image of science fiction, this churn and its resonances carry powerful prismatic valances that hyper-mythologize experiential depictions of race based violence into the subreal—not counter-narratives, but fragmented allegorical seizures of the agency of settler colonial logics as interwoven traumas that operate on the colonial subject or racialized body.
A widely circulating anecdote regarding Butler’s remarks on a significant bias in the realm of science fiction states: “A white sci-fi author once claimed that Blacks were unnecessary because aliens were already present.” This statement underscores how mainstream sci-fi trends recycle predictable themes, laced with and undergirded by scientific racism. Thus, the marginalization or outright erasure of Black individuals—particularly Black women—and their “nonhuman” status as interchangeable with aliens remains a persistent element of sci-fi futurism’s outdated narrative in what James rightfully calls the ‘weary present.”
Vital to Euro Scifi speculation is the notion of the Black female as an object of subliminal horror persisted throughout the 19th century. As Meg Armstrong notes in Effects of Blackness, Black women were often equated with “Hottentot” figures in European and British imagery, representing grotesque and excessive sexuality. This portrayal rendered the Black woman “a collecting pool for all that is imagined as excessive” in relation to conventional ideals of beauty and civilization.
Armstrong critiques the enduring silence in philosophical discussions of the sublime regarding its connection to embodied and exotic differences. She argues that even deconstructive approaches fail to address the prevalent association between the sublime and racial, cultural, and gendered bodies. Philosophical discourses on sublimity, such as those by Kant and Burke, deliberately distance themselves from these embodied forms of difference while erasing the historical and cultural contingencies that brought such figures into focus. In Kant’s Critique of Judgment, natural objects like mountains, oceans, and vast spaces were associated with “culturally unintelligible” bodies from colonized regions, marked by their racial and cultural differences and often linked to European imperialist projects. These bodies, initially abject—neither subject nor object—were absorbed into aesthetic discourse to organize desires for difference while simultaneously disavowing the transgressive passions they inspired. Armstrong notes that this process, central to what she calls the “ideology of the aesthetic,” positions the subject within a global network of racialized and gendered bodies, whose markings are integral to self-identification and the projection of illegitimate or unspoken desires of Europeans.
The ambivalence of the sublime lies in its tension between awe and discomfort; its visionary promise of totality is undermined by the contradictions and ruptures inherent in its aesthetic framing. Burke’s sublime often embodied this unease in racialized and gendered terms, as seen in a young white man’s fear of a Black woman or Kant’s attribution of terror to “the Spaniard.”
In the image culture that pools around race, the sublime can serve as a tool of mastery and control, it also signifies terror and transgression, disrupting societal norms. Armstrong concludes that aesthetic discourse works tirelessly to contain these excesses through the sublime but never achieves satisfaction, as the sublime always exceeds the structures of identification and mastery intended to restrain it. “Rather, the sublime exceeds this drama of identification and marks the sheer ecstasy of the image of foreign bodies.”
In this way, Butler’s work serves as a science fiction exemplar, utilizing the genre’s clichés—and her own presence within it—as interventions against the displacements that both science fiction and society employ to dissociate Black identity into a primitive sublime. She is not writing in opposition to white supremacist narratives but rather writing into them, exposing and reconfiguring their masks. While I critically agree with James, the sliding doors into the experience of Black Racial Violence is a house on fire or water or both, one in which Black Folk are often drowning before an audience in the theater of racial sciences.
