Is it a new messiah or the mother goddess return?

Considerations ablout female protagonism in the dystopia Earthseed series, by Octavia Butler

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the Earthseed series, by Octávia Butler, which includes the novels The parable of the Sower (2018) and Parable of the talents like a dystopian novel in which recurring historiographical aspects in the colonization process are aesthetically reworked in the plot and taken as intertext and as a starting point. We understand that, in these narratives, the historical and the fictional are combined, making historiography function as a compositional element of the fiction. This occurs mainly in the narrative tendency to give new meaning to stereotypes of femininity in a black protagonist who is elevated to the status of community and religious leader. These novels are analyzed from the perspective of post-colonial theories as examples of counter-narratives, as explained by Spivak (2010), in which the female voice, narrative and authorial, acts as a mechanism to question the domination process based on the modus operandi of colonization culture, which uses power and language to effect domination. We also aim, based on this same theoretical perspective, to understand how the religious issue is given new meaning in dystopia, highlighting the danger of repeating to past errors regarding religion as a basis for subordinating and killing, and how these novels help to overcome the old-fashioned view of the gender roles delimitation so common in primordial narratives.