Connecticut Public Radio: A look at how 2024 was imagined

Jones is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in UC’s College of Arts and Science.

Along with a panel of experts, Jones contributed to the discussion with a literary analysis of “The Parable of the Sower,” a work of fiction written by the award-winning author Octavia E. Buter (1947–2006).

The book, published in 1993, is set in Los Angeles, around the year 2025, when the world experiences chaotic events very similar to the events of current times. 

“Butler is looking around at what is happening in the early 90s: gated communities and the defunding of public institutions…and projecting what will happen if we do not change,” Jones said in the interview.

Topics covered in the book and interview include mass migration, political upheaval, the separation of families and how the underclass are treated.

Jones opined that Butler’s novel is meant to be instructive and provide a set of guidelines, one of which is: “First, listen to Black Women.”

Jones is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in UC’s College of Arts and Science. Her forthcoming book is “Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women's Speculative Fiction.”

Listen to the interview.

Featured image at top of empty streets in LA. Photo/iStock/BrasilNut1