Feminismos especulativos “panamefricanos”: alegorías afrofuturistas de regeneración para mundos posibles en Octavia Butler y Lu Ain-Zaila

Abstract

In this essay, I contrast the imaginative and political narratives of two Afrofuturist female writers: U.S.’s Octavia Butler and Brazil’s Lu Ain-Zaila. Although they both write in different times and geographies, their fictions coincide in the fact that they seek to empower their female main characters so that they can correct the world that we know. I suggest that their Panamefrican (Lélia Gonzalez) speculative feminisms create allegories of Afrofuturist regeneration (Donna Haraway), insofar as their aesthetic projects emerge from the borders not only of American intersectionality, but also of a modernity crafted in the belly of the Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy). How do these literatures figure the empowering transformation of their female afrofuturist characters? What are the skills they acquire to regenerate the world and imagine other forms of relating to each other? I read the short-stories “The Book of Martha” (1995) by Octavia Butler and “Crianças vermelhas (2018) by Lu Ain-Zaila to analyze the transformation of Martha and Minkha, their main characters, and the powers they receive to change the world.