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Octavia Butler’s Kindred tells the story of Dana Franklin, a black woman living in the post-civil rights era of 1976 who becomes a time traveler, visits antebellum America, and experiences slavery. This essay examines how Butler appropriates the generic conventions of the slave narrative and science fiction in order to rewrite the African-American history of slavery and criticize its legacy of racism and sexism. The novel is often considered a neo-slave narrative—a literary genre popular in the 1970s and 1980s in which supernatural, fantastic elements are added to the traditional African-American slave narrative. Butler is particularly indebted to the works of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs for certain themes, such as the importance of literacy, the master-slave dynamic, and elements of the sentimental novel. More significantly, Butler uses the literary convention of science fiction to remember past history and disconnect from the present reality. The past becomes an alternate reality of the present, and the present becomes a reflection of the past. Juxtaposed with slavery of the past, the present-day interracial marriage between Dana and Kevin (her white husband) is defamiliarized according to the device known as “cognitive estrangement.” This alienation of the present makes it possible to criticize the institutionalized violence and performative dimensions of racism and sexism, which are typically internalized by victims and victimizers. Combining the slave narrative with science fiction, Butler revisits past history and the present reality, not simply by means of textbook representation, but through her character’s painful but viable physical experience that leaves its trace in Dana’s disabled body.
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Octavia Butler, Kindred, slave narrative, science fiction, genre, cognitive estrangement
