CBH Talk | Susana M. Morris and Ibi Zoboi Discuss “Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler”
Susana M. Morris’s new book, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, is a magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.
As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.
In this outstanding work, Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves.
Join Morris in a conversation moderated by Ibi Zoboi, author of Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler. Curated by Morgan Jerkins.
Participants
Susana M. Morris is a Black feminist scholar and a cultural critic who has dedicated her career to studying the interior lives of Black women. She is an associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. A former Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature and co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective. Her other works include the co-edited collection The Crunk Feminist Collection and the co-authored young adult handbook Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. Her writing has appeared in Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com, and Ebony.com, and she has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and in Essence magazine.
Ibi Zoboi is the New York Times bestselling author of books for children and teens, including American Street, a National Book Award Finalist, Pride, a modern remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and the Walter Award and LA Times Book Prize-winning Punching the Air, co-written with Exonerated Five member Yusef Salaam. Ibi is a two-time Coretta Scott King Award honoree for The People Remember, her debut picture book, and Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler. She is the winner of the 2024 CSK Award for Nigeria Jones. She edited the anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America and has written Okoye to the People, a Black Panther novel for Marvel.
