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.
Across her works, Octavia Butler taps into and destabilizes a primary process of Eurocentrism—relativizing the past into “civilized” and “primitive.” This dichotomy is a device chiefly employed by primitivists in the science fiction community to mask present violence and mythologize the future of violent colonial belief. It creates a literary genre that is strangely preoccupied with the image of ideology, both in terms of the illusory nature of political optics, rhetoric and risk assessment. Butler’s engagement with these themes evokes Césaire’s concept of the boomerang effect and its implications for Black writers’ pathos and ethos of life under U.S. transatlantic settler colonialism.
Aimee Césaire describes the boomerang effect as a process of dehumanization enacted upon others; the colonizer, in assuaging his conscience by routinely treating the other as an animal, ultimately transforms himself into one.This boomerang in the abstract is an imaginative space designed as political, revealing the physiological evisceration of the Other in primitivism, alongside the will of their annihilators to capture and the importance of seeing and re- enacting violence as a political inevitability.
As Césaire notes on this effect: “And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
The resulting image of ideology is of great importance to the formation of fascist myth-poetics, illustrating the boomerang effect that occurs in deeply psychological ways to combat the necropolitical reality of holding advantageous positions within racial colonial orders. The image regimes of these cultures are haunted by a stutter of incomplete gestures, images warped by the absence or presence of the bearers of life lost to the theater of war and subjection.This imaginative space holds a sacrosanct valence, envisioning itself as respectful of life and world building processes within Western colonial hegemony. However, it remains “narratively blind” to its bloody Imperial racial nature.
In these representations, there is an “echo of incompleteness1” that, as Mark Christian Thompson explains, underpins fascist mythology. Fascist art constructs a “core myth of rebirth and renewal” by idealizing the Volk’s greatness, staging a mythic unity that violently “destroys material history” to reconstruct reality as both ideology and aesthetic.2
The aesthetic boomerang of dehumanization functions as an affective pattern of violent signals directed at non-white peoples. It manifests in the simultaneous co-fading and co-emerging of whiteness as a socially dominant force that liquidates non-white existence, reducing it to primitive fascinations while projecting these subjects as native threats. This obsession with defining and redefining the torture and death of colonial subjects becomes a source—an impetus for the perpetual search to dissect and derive meaning from death-dealing forms of governance. The spiritual erasure of the dead colonial subject, combined with the hyper-observation and control of other life forms, evolves into a speculative volition: a sub-symbolic realm of meaning floating in political and historical deniability. This deniability3 enables the projection of perpetual threat as a tool for maintaining the trans-subjective structure of whiteness, organized around a logic of evisceration that engages the primitive both as a repository of humanity and as a site of paradoxical self-definition for white identity (Rodriguez).
- 1. Thompson, Mark Christian. Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars. University of Virginia Press, 2007.
- 2. Thompson, Mark Christian. Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars. University of Virginia Press, 2007.
- 3. Mbembe, Achille, and Steven Corcoran. Necropolitics. Duke university Press, 2019.
- 4. Allen, Marlene D. “Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ Novels and the ‘Boomerang’ of African American History.” Callaloo, vol. 32, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1353–65.
Thompson elaborates, “Thus, fascist aesthetics produce the effect of the completion of history in myth by saying nothing. The fascist text remains a series of cryptic images that cannot be systematized and thus accrue concrete, deconstructible meaning…so difficult for critics to limn is because it utilizes any aesthetic means necessary in an attempt to remain indefinable.”
In Dylan Rodríguez’s Inhabiting the Impasse, the term “epidermalized power” is framed through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s concept of epidermalization, where racial power operates at a deeply embodied level, collapsing individual and collective physical schemas into racialized constructs. Rodríguez refers to it as “Fanonist epidermalization in its most capacious and deindividualized rendition,” theorizing how racial power ingrains itself into the flesh, creating an enduring schema of systemic violence.
Adding to the force of the boomerang effect, primitivism in Western media and its discourse often romanticizes or vilifies non-Western peoples as “savage,” “uncivilized,” or inherently different, thus justifying their subjugation and exploitation. Blackness, as an etheric grammar of consumable and combustible relational aesthetics, serves as an onto-epistemology—born out of, and in reaction to, “[an] extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing interruption that arranges each line” of stripping the humanity of Black indigenous folk, along with their individuality and complexity, reducing them to caricatures that serve colonial narratives, interests, and threats.
However, it is Butler as a fiction writer building an oppositional gaze to black inferiority, to the complex negotiations of black inner life- the burden of the psychology of dehumanization- alienation, disfiguring traditions6, exclusion all become boomeranged around both the microcosms of black life- the misogyny.
Césaire’s boomerang effect is crucial to understanding the shape of Butler’s science fiction landscapes. Her habit of collecting allows her to graft reality and language from her sources into her characters as actors—whether commercial, fictional, news, or scholarly, especially their subdued or dog whistle racisms and authoritarianism. This tone permeates the voices of her characters; she emphasizes language as a site of historically significant record, often reflecting violence, oppression, exclusion, and dispossession, serving as an oppositional gaze on various forms of connection. However, it is Butler as a fiction writer building an oppositional gaze to black inferiority, to the complex negotiations of black inner life- the burden of the psychology of dehumanization- alienation, disfiguring traditions, exclusion all become boomeranged around both the microcosms of black life- the misogyny. Violence, and cultural betrayal within the community swings in Butler’s boomerang through the layers of internal domestic struggle “to be” or “to exist” as a black woman and the macrocosms that affect race- like gender, class and awareness, cognition, empathy, nonverbal communications, environmental changes and political shifts that race stabilizes into and emerges from.
- 5. Moten, Fred. In The Break: Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
- 6. Lytoard, Jean-François. The Libidinal Economy. Minuit, 1974.
By linking her own coping mechanisms and systematizing them through her work, she relentlessly interrogates the racializing processes of her time and before her—those that would belittle, prohibit, or undermine her career and life as a writer. In doing so, she combats negation with persistent self-determination. Euro- and Afro-futurism, along with sci-fi, revolve around projections of fantasies that continue to center the logic of evisceration and the consumption of racialized voices and narratives of struggle into the theater of the optics of racial progress.
Especially evident in Butler’s work is her use of Eurocentric preoccupations and clichés related to power structures within sci-fi speculation to invert expectations surrounding critiques of race. Since its inception, sci-fi as a genre has typically housed the paranoia and fears associated with shifting technological threats to White Western heteronormative and Christian ways of life in the contexts of colonial world-deaths.7
Butler effectively shifts the genre’s stereotypical misdirection linked to the conjure of the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ as a racial exotic threat in Eurocentric fiction, her work is able to address the roots of the dissonance inherent in EuroFuturism’s erasure and dependence on its historical colonial violence to frame its own perilous futurity. Butler uses the thinness of the genres form around racial science to rupture the link of enmity the science fiction provides to white settler violence through its superficial cohesion of disposing colonial threat with the natural, supernatural alien and racial body. Butler capitalizes on language that reveals the falseness of the settler logic and the incomplete records it leaves behind as scientific progress. She employs this index of speculative narrative threats and desires to highlight the weight of their observable oppressive or racializing effects on her characters. In this way, she intervenes in the process of speculation, supplanting it with a matrix of tested hypotheses concerning patterns of violent effects at interpersonal, intergenerational, social, and scientific levels of racial violence of the inner and outer worlds of Black feminine beings.
- 7. Kipling.
