Research question: How does Butler’s Parable of the Sower navigate the impact of the crack epidemic on the socioeconomic, political, and environmentalist sphere during the 1990s?
- Agar, Michael. “The Story of Crack: Towards a Theory of Illicit Drug Trends.” Addiction Research & Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/1606635021000059042.
- Flamini, Alessandro, et al. “Illegal Drugs and Public Corruption: Crack Based Evidence from California.” EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, vol. 69, 2021, pp. 102005-, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2021.102005.
- Murch, Donna. “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs.” The Journal of American History (Bloomington, Ind.), vol. 102, no. 1, 2015, pp. 162–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav260.
- Bourgois, Philippe. “Crack and the Political Economy of Social Suffering.” Addiction Research & Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, 2003, pp. 31–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/1606635021000021322.
- Acker, Caroline Jean. “How Crack Found a Niche in the American Ghetto: The Historical Epidemiology of Drug-Related Harm.” BioSocieties, vol. 5, no. 1, 2010, pp. 70–88, https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2009.1.
- Dunlap, Eloise, et al. “The Severely-Distressed African American Family in the Crack Era: Empowerment Is Not Enough.” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, vol. 33, no. 1, 2006, pp. 115–39, https://doi.org/10.15453/0191-5096.3138.
My research process turned out to be more difficult than I’d originally expected because the key terms that I’d been putting into google scholar and JSTOR weren’t outputting results that would aid in my research. With that, I had to alter some parts of my research question to better fit. I narrowed it down to focus only on the decade in which the novel was written and instead of trying to encompass such a large topic, I decided to focus on one impact on the sphere of interest. The key search terms I used included: crack epidemic, (southern) California, 1990s, politics, environment(alism), and socioeconomics. I lucked out that most, if not all, of my sources were peer-reviewed and available through the Hunter library.
I think the idea of researching an important historical context in the novel is great. Clausen does something similar in his piece. But you need to find more sources that examine the role of “pyro” within the novel, since what you have is not very “Englishy,” focusing primarily on the crack epidemic itself, rather than its reimagination in Butler’s text. I think the material you’ve found is useful to provide a sense of what the crack epidemic was. But you’ll need to find some criticism on the novel that helps you fold this historical research back into the novel itself.