Across Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, touch, chemosensation, and sensitivity to DNA itself offer a basis for building kinship relations that stretch across both species and interplanetary boundaries. In Dawn (1987), for instance, surviving a planetary apocalypse and centuries of racial capitalist violence and war making requires the reeducation of the senses. When she wakes up on a spaceship after nuclear war has made most of Earth uninhabitable, the protagonist Lilith Iyapo must slowly overcome her conditioned visual responses (“Look at me,” insists Lilith’s Oankali companion) and then learn to interact with a being whose face is filled with “sensory tentacles” (Butler [1987] 2000: 15). She is genetically recoded thanks to the preternatural sensitivity of the third gender known as ooloi (who can sense and manipulate DNA) and becomes capable of communicating through chemical cues. Through the transmission of olfactory chemical signals, “Strangers of a different species [are] accepted as...
Redistributions of the Sensible: An Introduction to “Senses with/out Subjects” Available to Purchase
Erica Fretwell is associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (2020). Her current research is on sentimentality and anaesthetics, and on haptic literacies.
Hsuan L. Hsu is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (2020), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (2015), and Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2010). He is currently writing a book on air conditioning for Bloomsbury.
Erica Fretwell, Hsuan L. Hsu; Redistributions of the Sensible: An Introduction to “Senses with/out Subjects”. American Literature 1 September 2023; 95 (3): 447–457. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10679195
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