Octavia E. Butler Seminar at PAMLA 2025 (San Francisco, 11/20-23) (PAMLA)
San Francisco
Organization: PAMLA
Event: PAMLA
We are seeking proposals for papers that explore Octavia E. Butler’s oeuvre for a special session at the PAMLA 2025 Conference in San Francisco.
The session format is a seminar: Four to seven participants will share their paper ahead of time and then present a brief (five to seven minute) summary of their paper during the seminar, allowing time for an extended question and discussion period.
All submissions are welcome, but because Butler’s literature evidently lives in the past, present, and future—within the fictional worlds she builds and in our world as her readers—we are particularly interested in papers that engage with her work in relation to the 2025 PAMLA conference theme, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.”
Octavia E. Butler identified herself as a histofuturist, meticulously tracing patterns from the past to better inform her present and imagine speculative futures. Characters like Dana Franklin, Lilith Iyapo, Asha Vere, or Lauren Olamina often confront a similar undertaking, navigating echoes from their pasts in order to secure their futures. Like a palimpsest, traces from the past haunt the present and future in Octavia E. Butler’s works, in ways both discernible and unconscious.
Some particular topics of interest for this session include (but are by no means limited to):
· Post-apocalyptic sites of memory or the scorched California landscape as a palimpsest in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
· Nostalgic views of the past and their connection with physical violence in the Parables
· The creation of palimpsests by Asha Vere in Parable of the Talents
· Preserving memories in Earthseed texts and in Lauren’s journal in the Parables
· The body as palimpsest (embodied and genetic memory) in Kindred and Lilith’s Brood
· Kindred as a neo-slave narrative
· Queered time, time travel, and interplay between past and present, especially in Kindred
· Erasure and recovery of memory in Fledgling and Lilith’s Brood
· Alien echoes of historic human colonization in Bloodchild and Lilith’s Brood
· Film, television, and musical adaptations of Octavia E. Butler’s work as palimpsests: what is rewritten, what is erased, what haunts?
· Butler as a prophet: are her predictions haunting us?
· What it means to be a histofuturist, as Butler herself identified
· Exploring the reasoning behind Butler’s present-day resurgence
We are open to all papers that celebrate the work of Octavia E. Butler, even if they do not directly engage with the conference theme.
Please submit your proposal (title, 50-word abstract, 250-500 word proposal, and short bio) through the PAMLA portal by May 15: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19596
Please email the panel organizer, Jade Saffery, at jadejsaffery910@gmail.com, with questions or concerns about the CFP. Note that all PAMLA presenters must be paid members.
PAMLA 2025 Conference Info
The PAMLA 2025 Conference will be held at the elegant InterContinental San Francisco in San Francisco, California. The conference will begin on Thursday, November 20, and continue through November 23, 2025.
The 2025 PAMLA Conference is being held entirely in-person at the InterContinental. There will be no virtual or hybrid sessions or papers–the entire conference is being held in-person.
Our 2025 Conference Theme is “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.” Note: special sessions proposals are welcome, both on and off this theme!
And our CFP portal is now open: paper proposals are due May 15!
The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA), the west coast affiliate of the MLA, is a warm, welcoming, inclusive Humanities and Arts association dedicated to the creation, advancement, and diffusion of the aesthetic practices and knowledge of ancient & modern languages, literatures, cultures, and the arts. Approximately 800 to 1,000 faculty, students, writers, and interested independent scholars and members of the community attend our annual PAMLA conference, which offers scholars and writers the opportunity to share research and creative artistic works in a friendly, stimulating atmosphere.
PAMLA, founded as the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast in 1899, and the western affiliate of the Modern Language Association, is dedicated to the creation, advancement, and diffusion of the aesthetic practices and knowledge of ancient and modern languages, literatures, cultures, and the arts.
Please email Craig Svonkin if you have any questions about PAMLA or the PAMLA conference: director@pamla.org.
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19596
Jade Saffery
