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The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) and The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson (Dahkóta) were first published in 2021. Although very different novels in some respects, they also have some traits in common. Besides the year of publication and being written by Native American women writers, they both feature as the main protagonist a Native American woman living in the late twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Both novels deal with the Native protagonist’s struggles and survivance in geographical areas that were bought or otherwise appropriated by white settlers in the mid-nineteenth century. The U.S.-Dakota war of 1862 is mentioned in both novels, but it figures more prominently in The Seed Keeper where the reader in some of the chapters follows a character who survives the war and who is the protagonist’s great-grandmother. “Unsettling settlers” in connection to the two novels, as I will propose in this paper, should be understood both in terms of the depiction of how white settlers and their descendants have unsettled and still unsettle Native peoples and of how the Native characters, in turn, unsettle characters of European descent and settler colonialism through survivance (Vizenor) and engaged resistance (Rader). In this way, both The Sentence and The Seed Keeper highlight Indigenous histories that have been suppressed or overshadowed by histories of immigration, settlement, and progress. They also contribute to an American cultural imaginary in which Native people take the center stage instead of continually being cast as adversaries, or pushed to the margins.

African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns.

Academic work on Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction has increased exponentially since the 1990s, and Butler is a towering presence in the multidisciplinary field termed Afrofuturism. A fairly new development regarding Butler’s oeuvre – her first novel Patternmaster was published in 1976, her last, Fledgling, in 2005 – is the interest in adapting her novels to different media. In the past five years, there have been two graphic novel adaptations: Kindred (2017) and Parable of the Sower (2021); and Parable of the Talents will allegedly also soon be published in the form of a graphic novel. A TV series based on Butler’s neoslave narrative Kindred (1979) premiered on Hulu in December, and some of her other novels are considered for film and television adaptations. These adaptations were, however, preceded by The Seeing Ear Theater’s radio or audio theater adaptation of Kindred, which aired in February 2001. In this paper, I will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006; 2nd ed. 2013) in order to begin to discuss the three twenty-first century adaptations of Kindred: the radio play at the very beginning of the century, the graphic novel in the age of BLM and Trump, and the very recently produced TV series. As Hutcheon points out, “An adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture …” (142). In addition to addressing some contextual aspects, I will examine the adaptations in terms of narrative and aesthetic strategies.

In the 1990s, I analyzed science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1979 neoslave narrative Kindred by employing Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which focuses on how time and space are fused together in literature: time “becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes … responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 84). The chronotope, moreover, “defines genre and generic distinctions,” as well as shaping the constitution of characters and the meaning of narratives (85, 250). In Butler’s novel, African American Dana, who is its first-person narrator and protagonist, is repeatedly thrown back in time from her house in Pasadena, California, in 1976, in order to save her white ancestor’s life in Maryland in the early 1800s. In the process, she has to adapt to a time and place where she is regarded and treated as a slave. This paper will focus on Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (2017) by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. The chronotope has proven to be productive in scholarly discussions on the relatively new genre of the graphic novel, and I will briefly address the specific relations between time and space in graphic novels in general compared to the comic book, the novel, and film, before presenting how time, space, and time travel are depicted in this graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s novel in terms of the chronotope. Different aspects of history, as well as cultural history, are obviously important to this speculative neo-slave narrative from the 1970s and its adaptation almost 40 years later.

Full title of review:Book review: Gregory J. Hampton and Kendra R. Parker, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 290 pages. ISBN 978-1-3500-7963-2.Aparajita Nanda and Shelby L. Crosby, eds.God Is Change: Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021, 242 pages. ISBN 978-1-4399-2112-8.ISI for The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler: 000810125800005ISI for God Is Change: 000810125800008

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate why and how African American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s fiction is taught at Karlstad University, Sweden. Over the past twenty years, a number of her novels and short stories have been included in various courses in English at different levels at this university. The essay focuses in particular on why and how Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980) is integrated into an M.A. course on African American women writers’ novels, which was taught in the springs of 2019 and 2020. This novel is contextualized both in terms of the course as a whole, which includes novels from Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), and the genres of speculative fiction and the neoslave narrative. The essay also briefly brings up and reflects on student responses to Wild Seed, concerning gender issues and sexuality. It concludes that there are numerous reasons for including this novel in a course on African American women’s novels. In general, Octavia Butler is among the most important and influential American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and her works have much to offer in a contemporary European classroom.

In the 1990s, I analyzed science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1979 neoslave narrative Kindred by employing Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which focuses on how time and space are fused together and form a whole in literature. In Butler’s novel, African American Dana, who is its narrator and protagonist, is repeatedly thrown back in time from her house in Pasadena, California, in 1976, in order to save her white ancestor’s life in Maryland in the early 1800s time and again. In the process, she has to adapt to a time and place where she is regarded and treated as a slave. This paper will focus on Kindred: a Graphic Novel Adaptation (2017) by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. How are time and time travel depicted in this graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s novel? How is Butler’s story adapted by Duffy and Jennings with 21st-century readers in mind almost 40 years after the novel was published? Does it make sense – and in that case how – to employ the chronotope in a reading of the graphic novel? As these questions indicate, my work on the graphic novel adaptation of the novel is still at a very early stage but I hope to be able to present some pertinent answers addressing time in this graphic novel at the conference.

After almost two years with SARS-CoV-2, causing COVID-19, we all have experience of living with a virus on a global scale. It has meant changes in how we conduct our everyday lives, at least temporarily. Although this virus can infect all human beings, this pandemic has made glaringly obvious differences concerning age, health, gender, social status, ethnic backgrounds, professions, access to technology, etc. and has reinforced local, national, and global inequalities and injustices based on lack of means, solidarity, and democracy. In this paper, I will examine how two women science-fiction writers envision humans living with an extraterrestrial virus in novels written in the 1980s and 1990s: African American Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984) and British-American Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1992). In Butler’s novel the virus is brought to Earth by a returning astronaut, who tries to keep the virus from spreading; in Griffith’s the virus infects people who try to colonize another planet and kills the men. The remaining women settles the planet, and many years later, which constitutes the present of the novel, the Company sends an expedition to try out a vaccine. Both novels depict newly infected main characters who experience that the virus changes them and ultimately empowers them in certain ways. It also irreversibly changes the conditions under which they live. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s theories, as well as Octavia Butler’s ideas as expressed across her oeuvre, I will discuss the relationship between the human host and the virus in the two novels, and its impact on the individual and society within the imagined worlds. In particular, the paper will highlight issues of gender and sexuality.

Making home explores the orphan child as a trope in contemporary US fiction, arguing that in the times of perceived national crisis, concerns about American identity, family and literary history are articulated around this literary figure. The book focuses on orphan figures in a broad, multi-ethnic range of contemporary fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison among others, and investigates genres as carriers of cultural memory, looking particularly at the captivity narrative, historical fiction, speculative fiction, the sentimental novel and the bildungsroman. From a decisively literary perspective, Making home engages socio-political concerns such as mixed-race families, child welfare, and racial and national identity, as well as shifting definitions of familial, national and literary home. By analysing how contemporary novels both incorporate and resist gendered and raced literary conventions, how they elaborate on symbolic and factual meanings of orphanhood, and how they explore kinship beyond the nuclear and/or adoptive family, this book offers something distinctly new in American literary studies. It is a crucial study for students and scholars interested in the links between literature and identity, questions of inclusion and exclusion in national ideology, and definitions of family and childhood.

African American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s fiction has been one of my research interests since the mid-1990s, and I have taught a variety of her short stories and novels over the last two decades. Her dystopian short story “Speech Sounds” (1983) has served as an excellent first literature text for first-term students, as it deals with the loss of language and communication and is an exemplary short story. In co-taught thematic M.A. courses, I have used Parable of the Sower (1993) in the Dystopia and Apocalypse course and “Amnesty” (2003), “Bloodchild” (1984), and Dawn (1987) in the SF and Intercultural Encounters course. In this paper, I will focus on Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980), partly in the context of an M.A. course on African American women’s novels from Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), which I have taught in the spring terms of 2019 and 2020. Wild Seed is a kind of neo-slave narrative and deals, albeit in speculative fashion, with American history. I chose it both for the course and this paper, rather than Butler’s neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979), for several reasons: its immortal protagonist’s and antagonist’s perspectives are wide-ranging both in terms of time and geography; while Kindred and the Parable novels have been the focus of an avalanche of scholarly articles in the twenty-first century, Wild Seed is still a relatively under-researched novel that deserves more attention; and the student engagement with this novel is current. In this paper, I will briefly touch on how Wild Seed deals with the transatlantic slave trade and American slavery, before moving on to how Butler’s depiction of sexuality in this novel appears to be even more disturbing today, after #MeToo, than it was in the historical context when it was first published.

Fairy tales have often been controversial, and today much of the controversy appears to revolve around gender issues. With a focus on gendered appearances and relationships, this article examines Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Tommelise’ and ‘The Snow-Queen’ as well as Adventures in Fairyland (1853), a book of fairy tales written by one of Andersen’s admirers and promoters in nineteenth-century USA, Richard Henry Stoddard. Depictions of female characters in these tales are varied, with protagonists not always adhering to the feminine beauty ideal. The portrayal of both girls and boys are sometimes influenced by the notion of the Romantic child, which seems to tone down gender differences in descriptions of characters. Some of Stoddard’s fairy tales have a masculinist bias, but on the other hand his tales often go beyond the happily-ever-after ending. Indeed, a few of his fairy tales are remarkably explicit about adult erotic love, physical attraction, and sexual desire. So, when viewed through the lens of gender, both Andersen’s and Stoddard’s nineteenth-century literary fairy tales offer a twenty-first-century reader quite a few surprises and much food for thought and discussion.

Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.

This introductory chapter describes how, in the Nordic countries, Gothic fiction has become increasingly pervasive and popular in the past few decades and invaded all cultural registers – popular, highbrow, children’s and young adult fiction., Narratives of Empire

Foreword to the Special Issue Past Imaginings: Studies in Honor of Åke Bergvall

On the publication of the first novel in the Swedish Engelsfors trilogy (2011-2013), which is about seven small-town teenage witches who have to stop the apocalypse, the two authors expressed the love they share for the ground-breaking American TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and My So Called Life (1994-1995). These two series communicated in significant ways with Sara Elfgren and Mats Strandberg when they were teenagers in the 1990s. This paper will focus on how elements from the two American series have been adapted and translated into particular Swedish circumstances in the Engelsfors trilogy. Examining the transformations that such transcultural translation entails, I argue, adds to the understanding of the long-term influences of American productions on subsequent productions in other countries and media. Moreover, the Engelsfors trilogy has been translated into twenty-five different languages including English and may thus in turn have an impact on English-language cultural productions.

This paper will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s account in A Theory of Adaptation (2013) of “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” in examining how two American adaptations of Nordic Gothic texts – Stephen King’s TV series Kingdom Hospital (2004) and Matt Reeves’s movie Let Me In (2010) – change what Hutcheon calls the “ideological valences” of the adapted texts: Lars von Trier’s Danish TV series Riget (1994, 1997) and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Swedish novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004) and its subsequent 2008 Swedish film adaptation. All of these narratives introduce ghosts and/or vampires into actually existing and, to a large extent, realistically depicted late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century Scandinavian and American environments. However, I will argue that there are significant ideological differences between the Nordic and the American texts, which have an impact on both the aesthetics and the effects of these Gothic or horror narratives.

Nordic Gothic

The temporal convergence between the social and cultural preoccupation with child sexual abuse, with the pedophile as the ultimate predator, and the appearance of the child vampire as a central character in vampire fiction in the late twentieth century can be traced to genre conventions and to representations of the vampire and of the child. This article examines vampire children and child sexual abuse in three novels: S. P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction (1984) and Valentine (1992), and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (2004), and shows how they tap into contemporary sexual taboos and fears for children in order to cre- ate uncanny and Gothic effects. Highlighting that the representations of the vampire child contain a number of dichotomies, the article also relates all three novels to splatterpunk, and outlines a different trajectory for the sympathetic vampire that led to Lindqvist’s novel, which triggered the Swedish Gothic boom in the twenty-first century., Nordic Gothic

TV series, movies, and literature. American horror and Gothic have had a large impact on Nordic productions, but at the same time Nordic Gothic – as well as Nordic Noir – has become extremely popular in the US. One example of the latter is Stephen King’s TV series Kingdom Hospital (2004), which is based on Lars von Trier’s Danish TV series Riget (1994, 1997). In her paper, Troy will employ Linda Hutcheon’s notion of transcultural adaptation in order to analyze some of the differences between King’s and von Trier’s TV series in regard to, for example, Gothic humor; the representation of the history of the setting, social institutions, the provincial vs. the urban, gender and class hierarchies; and media-specific features that guide the viewers’ perception, such as the title sequences and musical themes that frame the episodes as well as the special effects, camera angles, and the color and quality of the footage., Nordic Gothic

Lars von Trier’s TV series Riget (The Kingdom, 1994, 1997) engages with space and geography in various ways. The hospital (Rigshospitalet) in Copenhagen provides a labyrinthine and multi-layered setting equivalent to the castle or the haunted house in earlier Gothic narratives. It is a liminal space that both registers clashes and serves as a conduit between the past and the present, between rationality and the supernatural. Riget also highlights tensions cast as national between the Danish hospital staff and a Swedish physician who perceives his Danish colleagues as irrational and unscientific and who longs to be back in Sweden. This paper will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s account in A Theory of Adaptation (2013) of “transculturating” and “transcultural adaptations” in examining how the hospital and geographical tensions are portrayed in Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (ABC, 2004), an American TV series inspired by and based on Riget. In King’s adaptation the (fictive) hospital is placed in Lewistown, Maine, and the physician at odds with the rest of the hospital staff is from Boston and not from another country. This change, I would argue, introduces a different kind of geographical tension. Apart from discussing this tension and contrasting it to the national one in Riget, I will compare the depiction and function of the hospital in the American TV series to that of the Danish one., Nordic Gothic

Collective Traumas is about the traumatic European history of the 20th century – war, genocide, dictatorship, ethnic cleansing – and how individuals, communities and nations have dealt with their dark past through remembrance, historiography and legal settlements. Memories, and especially collective memories, serve as foundations for national identities and are politically charged. Regardless whether memory is used to support or to challenge established ideologies, it is inevitably subject to political tensions. Consequently, memory, history and amnesia tend to be used and abused for different political and ideological purposes. From the perspectives of historical, literary and visual studies the essays focus on how the experiences of war and profound conflict have been represented and remembered in different national cultures and communities. This volume is a vital contribution to memory studies and trauma theory. Collective Traumas is a result of the multidisciplinary research project on Memory Culture that was initiated in 2002 at Karlstad University, Sweden. A previous publication with Peter Lang is Memory Work: The Theory and Practice of Memory (2005).

The figure of the vampire is a peculiarly transnational phenomenon as it moves, sometimes with supernatural speed, between different countries, parts of the world, and media. As the title indicates, my point of departure for discussing the permutations and functions of the vampire child in different settings will be John Ajvide Lindqvist’s bestselling Swedish vampire novel Låt den rätte komma in [Let the Right One In] (2004), which was translated into English in 2007. The Swedish film adaptation of the novel, directed by Tomas Alfredson and with the screenplay written by Lindqvist, was first screened in 2008; it reached an international as well as national audience to great acclaim. In 2010, Matt Reeves’s American film adaptation, or remake, was released under the title Let Me In. In my presentation, I will not only comment on the Swedish vampire child Eli’s movement between different media and translation into the vampire girl Abby in the American film, but also suggest that Eli might have a forerunner in Thai-American S. P. Somtow’s eternally twelve-year-old vampire Timmy in Vampire Junction (1984), which has been considered a splatterpunk novel.

“Strange matings” is a quotation from African American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s fifth novel, Wild Seed (1980) – it also serves as the title of the second book entirely devoted to Butler’s work.[1] Nothing could be more appropriate since there are intimate encounters between humans and different species in a number of her narratives from the Clayarks (a quadruped hybrid human-alien species) in her first published novel Patternmaster (1974) to the Ina (vampires) in her last novel, Fledgling (2005). The protagonist of this novel is a genetic experiment, a hybrid, whose African American ancestry is the solution to a problem but, at the same time, means that her family members are murdered due to enduring racist ideas originating in American slavery, which in this speculative novel has spread to another humanoid species. In many of her novels, Butler addresses the racist notion of miscegenation both literally and figuratively. Many of her main characters are what other characters often regard as miscegenated offspring; many are also placed in situations where they have to embrace, or at least accept, inter-species biological relations and reproduce differently in order to survive and possibly develop. In this paper, I will focus on how Butler portrays “strange matings” and imagines different family constellations for hybrid protagonists against the backdrop of American ideas of miscegenation. [1]Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013) edited by Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl.

Octavia Butler mentioned her “ongoing fascination with biology [and] medicine,” when commenting on one of her own short stories (first published in 1987) in which she has combined elements from three genetic disorders to create the premises for the story. This fascination locates much of her oeuvre at the intersection of miscegenation and the medical. In many of her novels, she addresses the racist notion of miscegenation both literally and figuratively, and in biological as well as cultural contexts. Many of her main characters are what other characters often regard as miscegenated offspring; most are placed in situations where they have to embrace, or at least accept, interracial or inter-species biological and/or cultural relations – hybrid lives – in order to survive and possibly develop. For instance, the quotation “What will she give us all? Fur? Tails?” comes from Butler’s last novel, Fledgling (2005). The protagonist of this novel is a genetic experiment, a hybrid, whose African American ancestry is the solution to a problem but, at the same time, means that her family members are murdered due to enduring racist ideas originating in American slavery, which in this speculative novel has spread to another humanoid species. In this paper, I will focus on how Butler portrays and comments on miscegenation in Clay’s Ark (1984), a science fiction novel that features a physician as one of the main characters and depicts an alien infection that changes not only people’s lives but also their offspring.

Title: “’Strange Matings’ and Unexpected Encounters: Octavia Butler’s Hybrid Fictions” Abstract: “Strange matings” is a quotation from African American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s fifth novel, Wild Seed (1980) – it also serves as the title of the second book to date entirely devoted to Butler’s work. Nothing could be more appropriate since there are intimate as well as hostile encounters between humans and different species in many of her narratives from the Clayarks (a quadruped hybrid human-alien species) in her first published novel Patternmaster (1974) to the Ina (vampires) in her last novel, Fledgling (2005). Through these always cultural and often biological exchanges, Butler’s fiction explores the problems and possibilities of hybridity in ways that matches and sometimes surpass theoretical formulations of the concept. There is never an option for her human protagonists to settle with the notion of the “Sacred Image of the Same” (Butler, Survivor 1978); they have to find ways of dealing with “Others” – other races or ethnicities and/or other species– and with the outcomes of these encounters in terms of individual physical and mental changes and hybrid offspring. In this paper, I will examine a few examples of cross-species encounters in Butler’s fiction and discuss the theoretical implications of these fictional boundary crossings.