Letter from the Director

LETTER

from the director

dear friends,

I write to you at the end of another challenging academic year and in the middle of a tumultuous summer. Surely if we have learned anything from contentious public discourse, it’s that the stories we tell about our experiences, our beliefs, and our values matter. And the humanities are crucial to understanding how stories matter, how stories can convey truth but also distort it, how stories can solicit empathy but also invite acrimony, how stories record disaster and open room for hope.

In March of this year, the Institute for the Humanities explored the power of story in a series of events related to a performance of Parable of the Sower, an opera based on the 1993 novel of the same name by African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler and presented by the University Musical Society. Butler’s book explores the social consequences of environmental disaster and systemic injustice in a story about a future dystopian America. The opera version of the story, written by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon, calls on two centuries of Black music to underscore Butler’s insights about gender, race, and hope through music and performance. The institute’s Octavia Butler Week explored the power of Butler’s storytelling in a series of public events including conversations, panel discussions, a painting session, and even a scavenger hunt.

Our celebration of Butler was scheduled to open with a broad-ranging public conversation between composer Toshi Reagon and author, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about creativity, adaptation, and the powerful lessons to be drawn from Octavia Butler’s fiction. Alas, this much-anticipated conversation had to be canceled due to illness, but other planned events proceeded as planned. A panel on “Reading Octavia Butler” featured U-M faculty

who spoke about how Butler’s work has mattered to them and how it continues to be relevant to contemporary thinking about race, social justice, religion, and the environment. Faculty also spoke about teaching Octavia Butler’s works, describing the insights her novels can surface in classroom discussions, and in the conversation that followed, students and other audience members shared their own engagements with Butler’s fiction. In both the presentations and the discussion, Butler’s readers spoke forcefully to the power of stories to not just name and represent injustice, but also to imagine the changes needed to create a more equitable world.

The power of art to imagine the world otherwise was one of the subjects addressed in a virtual panel on “Art and Afrofuturism” that concluded the institute’s formal programming for Octavia Butler Week. Prominent artists and scholars from across the U.S. addressed the artistic, intellectual, and activist reach of Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic that addresses the concerns of the African diaspora through technoculture and speculative fiction. Our panelists described their own work in music, literature, film, video, and the visual arts, identifying Butler’s work as both inspiration and model. In addition to these three formal events, our undergraduate interns creatively organized activities that contributed to the celebration: a Parable Paint Night, in which students created art around the themes of Afrofuturism, activism, and science fiction, and a scavenger hunt that they called “Octavia’s Spaces in Community Places” and that used clues drawn from the novel to direct searches to sites on campus.

The enthusiastic participation in our Octavia Butler Week—and the soldout performances at UMS—suggest the extent to which we continue to think with enduring stories about injustice and about hope. Stories matter.

Please keep up with our events, exhibitions, and activities through our website. And please stop by to see an exhibition, hear a talk, attend a workshop. We’d love to share our stories with you.

With very best wishes,

—Peggy McCracken, director, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities