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영어

Critical evaluations on Octavia Butler’s most recognized fiction Kindred (1979) have accumulated at an incredible pace over the years, the novel duly endorsed as the author’s provocative engagement with race through her innovative morphing of different literary traditions and genres. In particular, much of the readings that trace the trajectory of the African American female protagonist Dana Franklin’s embodied time travels to the antebellum South rightly profess that the narrative device of time travel enables both the protagonist and her readers a direct encounter with American slavery, and the importance of historical knowledge and connection to the past in this process. In its defiance of some reified understanding of history, time travel can be revisionist than conservative. With the fascinating challenge of transforming history, time travel not only prompts an understanding of oneself in the continuum of others in the past, present, and future, but opens up history as processual and as a source of reproduction. In this essay, I concentrate on the significant import of time travel in Kindred, how Butler inserts it not simply as an apparatus or mechanism for temporal and spatial movement that pushes the plot and action, but offers it up as a radical narrative possibility as well as unattainability. In Kindred, there is no technological explication for the absence of mediation between the past and the present. I explore how the compelling potential of time travel, the possibility of “gambling against history,” is mustered up and expelled at the same time, specifically by tracing Dana’s perception and interaction with her slaveholding white male ancestor Rufus Weylin, and more prominently, her fraught relationship to her black maternal ancestor Alice Greenwood.