Telling Otherwise Futures: Unkowing Enfoldments and Pleasurable Hapticalities in Octavia E. Butler's "Amnesty"

Abstract

By placing Octavia E. Butler's oft overlooked short story "Amnesty" into dialogue with the theoretical insights of Kathrine McKittrick (unknowing), Sylvia Wynter (homo narrans), and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (hapticality), this paper thinks through the decisively human limits to transforming the violent practices of apprehension and our chances of embracing the open conjunctures of the possible and of life held in common. Writing from within the field of black studies, I elaborate on how Butler's rendering of the concept-metaphor "enfoldment" reconsiders futurity and human essence as inextricably tied to our collectively instituted signifying practices, as well as what blackness, pleasure, and storytelling might tell us about radical transformation and instantiating poiesis.