Open AccessFrom Contamination to Community: Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark
Author(s) -
Neeraja Sundaram
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
excursions/excursions journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2055-494X
pISSN - 2044-4095
DOI - 10.20919/exs.2.2011.143
Subject(s) - trope (literature) , search for extraterrestrial intelligence , michel foucault , sociology , order (exchange) , construct (python library) , epistemology , aesthetics , environmental ethics , philosophy , art , politics , political science , biology , literature , law , astrobiology , computer science , economics , programming language , finance
This paper examines the trope of the virus in Octavia Butler’s 1984 science fiction novel Clay’s Ark, where an alien virus manifests as a border organism that produces new forms of the human. I argue that the trope of the viral agent in Butler’s Clay’s Ark reconfigures the ‘self’ (the human) and the ‘other’ (the virus) at the level of the material and the discursive, leading to a reconceptualisation of the epistemological and ontological basis for the definition of and distinction between, the two. Secondly, the diseased, contagious self in Clay’s Ark, is subject to neither ‘containment’ nor quarantine, but instead is the basis for the formation of a new social contract in a world that is soon to be ravaged by an extraterrestrial epidemic. The paper demonstrates the pervasive influence of the epistemic and discursive formulations of the “human” in a social order transformed by viral invasion.