Women of color constructing subjectivity towards the future: Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Cynthia Kadohata

This dissertation explores visions of the future represented in the works of Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Cynthia Kadohata. These writers endeavor to project a future in which women of color are allowed greater agency in constructing their subjectivities. Until recently, fiction by multiply-oppressed women has been more concerned with reevisioning the past or finding voice in present oppositional discourses, and less with imagining a world of the future. However, the writers in this study embed innovative strategies for agency within their texts which reveal hidden futures pointing away from apparently endless cycles of domination. Combining sociocultural research and close readings, I examine how Morrison, Butler, and Kadohata shift this past-oriented discussion forward towards the future.;In concentrating on "the politics of time" (Johannes Fabian's term), I examine how these writers create a discourse which allows African American and Asian American women striving for agency to face two central ontological and epistemological questions regarding the future. First, what does it mean to come from an embattled past to a beleaguered present, only to discover that the next century may fail to offer empowering alternatives as well? And secondly, how does one effect a reconciliation with an egregious past, while at the same time, set new, paradigmatically different futures into motion?;Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Butler's Kindred (1979) present black female protagonists who struggle with a contentious present even as they are yoked to a problematic past. All the while, they make efforts to create even limited agency for themselves and their progeny. In Butler's futuristic novel, Parable of the Sower (1993), a multiracial group of characters battles temporal subordination in a post-technological United States which serves as the trope of a failed future. Kadohata's In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) focuses on young people coping with a lack of options amidst a disintegrating post-technological society. In so doing, the central characters construct new definitions of "family" and create a makeshift community in which race is backgrounded rather than foregrounded. All three novelists in this study critique and attempt to move their characters beyond domination towards liberatory futures.