Post-Apocalyptic Memory Sites: Damaged Space, Nostalgia, and Refuge in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

Abstract

This article argues for a reconceptualization of the role of nostalgia in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower to reconsider notions of shelter, dislocation, memory, home, and loss. More specifically, it aims to disentangle the complex interrelation between post-nostalgia, space, inherited memory, and speculation to identify sites of memory where a sense of home can be (re)drawn after apocalypse. In the novel, Butler discerns a post-apocalyptic world in which the downfall of previous political regimes has dissolved the senses of place, identity and community. Through speculation, Butler resituates the home(land) as a distant geographical and temporal construction that is both remote and damaged and can be retrieved only via post-memory, adaptability, and change. By examining the characters' relation with and resignification of the different spaces they occupy, this article reimagines the site of memory from the theoretical prism of post-nostalgia to locate emotional traces that elicit figurative journeys or returns home. If speculative fiction can dissect the world after catastrophe and help identify possible outcomes that project and respond to actual feelings of uncertainty and social unrest, then nostalgia's potential for subversion and change can be catalyzed by means of “speculative memory” to produce post-nostalgic figurations that might help retrieve a sense of community, ethics, and (home)place.