Date of Award

5-11-2025

Date Published

June 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Cultural Foundations of Education

Advisor(s)

Kal Alston

Keywords

Archival Studies;Cognition;Octavia E. Butler;Self-Definition;Self-Making;Speculative Thought

Abstract

This dissertation, Positioning the Unthought: Charting Octavia E. Butler’s Cognitive-Self, explores how Butler theorizes a dynamic self through a subset of her archived, unpublished commonplace books, housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Drawing on my original theory of cognizing self-making (CSM)—the dynamic, conscious process of developing psychological self-knowledge in active opposition to, yet beyond, systems of domination—this project examines the ways in which Butler represents and manipulates self-knowledge. I build upon Elizabeth Alexander’s (2004) notion of ‘Black Interiority,’ which captures Black inner life and creativity beyond the public face of stereotype and limited imagination, to highlight the malleability of self-concept and its intersection with existing frameworks of self-definition in Black Feminist Studies. Through a series of ‘conversations,’—what Therí Pickens (2019) describes as a set of organizational tools to open fields up to one another—I illuminate the historical and contemporary significances of CSM and explore this work vis-à-vis Butler’s archived self-writing. Conversation I: Cognizing Self-Making explores the motivations for creating this theory along with its inter/multidisciplinary genealogical backdrops. Conversation II: The (un)commonplace: The Archive, discusses the history of archives and the commonplace book as political, instable categories. Conversation III: Psionics, Noetics, and CSM: An Imagined Conversation is a constructed dialogue between ‘Octavia E. Butler’ and myself, where I use a combination of Butler’s verbatim archived self-writing, contextualized using supplemental published material, to discuss the ways she practices CSM. Here, I place my own voice and experiences in the dialogue and organically enlivening the ways the themes destabilizing of categories, documenting metacognitive epiphanies, and politicizing of science fiction emerge from Butler’s unpublished self-writing. Conversation IV: From Woe to Wonder, is the dissertation’s final section, but refuses a neat conclusion. Here, I reiterate the significance of the themes emerging from this project, highlighting the challenges, next steps, and broader implications. This project serves as an intervention not only in Butler studies but also in critically reexamining Black feminisms through the site of archives. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the internal, often unseen and taken for granted processes of selfhood are crucial to understanding intertwined narratives of identity—not merely as external performances but as deeply rooted, conscious processes. Subverting the ‘unthought’ as a generative possibility, this project challenges assumptions surrounding the Black feminist tradition of self-making. In doing so, it interrogates the iconicity imposed on Black women within a global political climate shaped by racial neoliberalism, identitarianism, and growing attacks on the humanities and education for social justice and liberation.

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Open Access

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