Master of Arts in English
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Browsing Master of Arts in English by Subject "Afrofuturism"
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Item Telepaths, Social Constructs, and Panoptical Power in Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series(Southern New Hampshire University, 2017-09-05) Matthews, Aisha Alia; Schiffman, MarcTaking Octavia Butler’s Patternist series as its primary source of inquiry, this paper examines the ontology of power, intersubjectivity, and social reality through the science and speculative fiction tropes of body-swapping and self-transmutation. Butler’s re-invocation of American slavery opens new possibilities for understanding the nature of being and the definition of humanity, while encouraging new perspectives in postmodernist thinking, most notably centered on the belief in the socially constructed nature of identity. More broadly, this paper places such dialogues in conversation with theories on Foucaldian power structures, Cartesian duality, and phenomenology, ultimately concluding that the socially constructed nature of the self obfuscates the truly human desires, such as that for power, which transcend the demographic differences defining current social realities.