The Contemporary Dystopian Reality of Slavery and Modern Capitalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

Critical dystopia as an analytic category for historical enquiry explores contemporary reality and its specificities in time and space. It functions as anagnorisis or recognition of the dystopian realities in the present through its generic mode of familiarising the heightened dystopian elements of the text as possible evolutions of current oppressions. This paper suggests that this anagnorisis through comparison and extrapolation is limited and needs to consider how the text ironically reveals the absence of historical specificity through its comparison of the contemporary present and the imagined future. Instead, specificity is replaced with a linear historical trajectory where dystopia occurs cyclically in metamorphosed forms within a fixed, yet evolving power-structure. This projects the nature of the dystopia in the text part of an evolutionary process, not a product of its historically specific period. Through the interrogation of how the legally abolished system of slavery is historically shifted into the future hyper-capitalist market system in Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, this paper will reveal how the anagnorisis of the novels functions to locate dystopia as present and evolving in a historical trajectory of cyclical structural repetition. This familiarisation of the historical event of slavery in the novels posits the dystopian text’s anagnorisis as not simply the recognition of dystopian elements specifically in the present but broadens it to the recognition of the historical evolution of those same human atrocities that appear to ‘resurge’ in dystopia.