In this paper, we explore strategies of emancipatory homemaking in Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed novels. We examine homemaking as a strategy, first, of persistence and, second, of adaptability. This allows us to define the home as a critical place that links various geographical scales, from the most intimate to the planetary. We build our argument by tracing the ways in which the protagonists of Butler’s Parables build homes in respect of a necessary negotation between persistance vis-a-vis violence and threats, and the necessity to adapt to the precarious social institutions that surround them. Such critical, multiscalar geography of home is proposed as a middle ground between extraterrestrial escapist tendencies, and the introvert isolationism of a homely enclave. Butler’s SF novels help critical geographers frame the paradoxical space of the home as a productive tension: Home is as much a place of loss, instability, and uncertainty as it is a locus of political agency, counteracting violence and liberating (inter)subjective kinship.
Paper published open access in cultural geographies, https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241293136