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This talk relates to Smalls' work-in-progress on Butler's novel Fledgling (2006), as well as their work related to Butler's archive at the Huntington Library in California. The chapter-in-progress, “Black Girl Tragic: Making a Monster out of Shori Matthews in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling,” organized around the concept of resurrection, comes from Smalls' next book project, titled Androids, Cyborgs, Others: Black Afterlives in Imaginary Futures, which thinks through the ethical, theoretical, and material desire to preserve Black life, creativity, and futurity by investigating how Black sentient life—human, plant, hybrid, machine—renders itself and gets rendered in the near-present-and distant-future.

Shanté Paradigm Smalls is a scholar, artist, and writer. Their teaching, writing, and research focus on Black popular culture in music, film, visual art, genre fiction, and other aesthetic forms. Dr. Smalls’ first book, Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City, which won the 2016 CLAGS Fellowship Award for best manuscript in LGBTQ Studies, the Library's 2022-2023 New York City Book Award, and was awarded Special (Honorable) Mention for the 2023 IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) International Book Prize, was published by NYU Press in June 2022. Their writing has appeared in The Arrow, QED, The Black Scholar, GL/Q, Women & Performance, Criticism, Lateral, American Behavioral Scientist, Suspect Thoughts, Syndicate Literature, the Feminist Press’s Queer and Now anthology (forthcoming), and the Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music. Currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at NYU, Smalls has also taught at St. John's University, University of New Mexico, and Davidson College. They have held fellowships from the University of Rochester Humanities Center, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and the James Weldon Johnson Fellowship at Emory University. shanteparadigm.com

Octavia E. Butler was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Born in Pasadena in 1947, she was the author of several award-winning novels including Parable of the Sower (1993), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Parable of the Talents (1995), winner of the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novel published that year. She was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future. Photo courtesy of the Octavia E. Butler Estate

This event is part of the Library's Black Literature Matters programming, generously supported by the Oak Foundation.

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