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A recurrent thematic concern of Octavia Butler's speculative fiction has become the exploration and revision of the mythology and authority of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Butler's interrogation of these aspects is specific: her texts seek to explore the correlation of a predominantly white-authored, historically inscribed patriarchal Christianity with the continuing legitimization of sexist and racist discourses. In part, Butler achieves this enterprise as a result of the generic possibilities offered by certain spaces found structurally in science fiction and fantasy. Imaginative figurations of alternative pasts, presents, and futures offer a space in which past subjugation and present inequalities can be queried and, through their revisualization, configured anew. Although Butler's fiction interrogates the authority of Christianity, it nonetheless acknowledges the affirming role that this religion has played in the lives of Black Americans from slavery to the present day. Yet in an echo of the counterdiscursive strategies employed by Black theology, Butler's works emphasize the necessity of the revision and displacement of Christianity in order to incorporate the specificity of the African-American experience. While in recent years Butler's fiction has been the subject of much critical attention, there has been little direct analysis of the prominent but ambiguous position accorded to religion in her work. I shall examine how, using the conventions of science fiction and fantasy, Butler problematizes the standpoint and authority of white-authored Christianity, how her fictions disruptively alter Christianity's terms through the introduction of competing religious narratives, and how Butler uses this transformation to envisage empowered, liberating figures of Black womanhood.
Central to the first book of Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago) is Lilith, one of the few human survivors rescued, by a group of gene-trading aliens called the Oankali, from the remnants of an Earth ravaged by nuclear war. "Writing back" the first book of the Old Testament, Butler's trilogy tells the story of the painful and difficult rebirth of humanity to a post-human future.(1) Choosing to enter the Judeo-Christian tradition at one of its most fundamental points, Xenogenesis not only usurps the authority of the original, but in the process transcribes the story into a science fictional context. Rather than resulting in "pseudomyth," Butler's text is able to place Genesis into what Darko Suvin describes as the "demystifying...