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From her earliest novel, Patternmaster(l976), to one of the most recent, Parable of the Talents (1998), Octavia E. Butler brings postcolonial understanding to bear on the possibilities inherent but unrealized in contemporary America. Just what is meant by "postcolonial" in relation to African Americans, however, is problematic. Among its various definitions, Susan VanZanten Gallagher's seems most appropriate: "writing that emerges from peoples who were colonized by European powers, now have some form of political independence, but continue to live with the negative economic and cultural legacy of colonialism" (4-5).' In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison analyzes the ways in which American slavery is metaphorically reflected in the colonial discourse of canonical American literature. Conversely, Peter Sands succinctly describes the colonized discourse of Butler's postcolonial perspective: "Her inversion of narrative point of view from colonizer to colonized, coupled with her deployment of cannibal tropes in the service of narratives that emphasize the permeability of the skin boundary and the mutability of the self, link her narratives to the history of colonialism and subjugation of bodies in the Americas." Descended from slaves, postcolonial African Americans embody that legacy as it continues to shape their lives. "I was poor, black, the daughter of a shoeshine man and a maid," Butler comments in a recent article, affirming that "where we stand determines what we're able to see" ("Brave New World" 166). From her perspective, "postcolonial" acknowledges a mere change in government rather than release from the ongoing effects of colonial racism.
Even the futures that Butler can imagine in her "feminist fabulations"2 reveal "the racism and imperialism in the scenario of feminist Utopia" (Donawerth 12). Her writings exemplify the "discourses of the Other" which Patrick McGee acknowledges as "the ground of all translation and the place (without place) from which the language of allegory emerges" (171). I have argued in Worlds Within Women that science fiction can allegorically comment on contemporary realities, citing in particular Butler's Patternist series. Her later fiction is equally cognizant that the legacy of colonialism shapes our ability even to imagine the alien Other. Her Oankali in Dawn (1987) identify a lethal "contradiction" of intelligence in the service of hierarchy as humanity's fatal flaw, yet they too are contradictory. As non-hierarchical as they appear...