Description
In the summer of 2020, after the very public murder of several Black people at the hands of police and vigilantes, a resurgence of protests to defund the police reignited the conversation about prison and police abolition. As a movement that calls for a complete restructuring of society as we know it, abolitionists must always be looking for new ways to call people in to this work and expand the coalition. In this thesis, I argue that Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) serve as one potential pathway into these important conversations. While many of the abolitionist theories I explore are not new, my argument is that the Parable series and the themes that it invokes can help to reach new people, and can help to change the minds of many by reorienting in a fictive world, which, in some ways, operates beyond the confines of the world we know today. Many of these theories articulate the “why” and “how” of abolition. I build on the work of many radical feminist, racialized, and otherwise marginalized activists and scholars who have looked to non-“traditional” materials as a means of theorizing. Inspired by their work, I consider speculative fiction as an avenue through which readers can engage with questions that can be, at times, unsettling or unapproachable—and as a way of inspiring its readers to imagine futures that may seem, at times, unimaginable.
