Lisa Y a s z e k
“A Grim Fantasy”: Remaking American History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
O
ctavia Butler’s novel Kindred ([1979] 1988) begins at the end of an adventure that has left her protagonist, the aspiring young African-American writer Dana, trapped in a wall of her own house—not
boarded inside the wall, not even confined, really, but standing with her arm somehow fused into the actual studs and sheetrock of the wall. To a certain extent, Dana’s confusion with this situation parallels that of the reader who opens Kindred expecting to read a historical novel of slave life only to find herself confronted with images that seem more appropriate to science fiction: How did Dana get there? How is this even possible? These personal and seemingly impossible questions become those of every class of people who find themselves, as Dana does, not simply on the wrong side of history but trapped and maimed by a history stranger and crueler than they have been taught to imagine.
In this essay, I examine Butler’s novel as a kind of memory machine that answers these seemingly impossible questions by using science fiction devices to re-present African-American women’s histories. One of the few prominent black authors in science fiction, Butler is often lauded for her depictions of future worlds where advanced technologies quite literally mediate race and gender.1 At the same time, her work is increasingly recognized as participating in African-American traditions of historical fiction.2 In particular, scholars identify Kindred as an important precursor to the neo–slave narratives created by authors such as Toni Morrison and Sherley Anne Williams in the 1980s and 1990s.3 Although these scholars always acknowledge Butler’s primary allegiance to science fiction, they rarely pursue the impact this might have on her historical fiction. Yet such a discussion seems fruitful. If one of the goals of African-American historical fiction is to interrogate how “race,” “gender,” and even “history”
1 See Sargent 1975; Friend 1982; and Armitt 1996.
2 See Govan 1986 and McKible 1994.
3 See esp. Beaulieu 1999 and Rushdy 1999.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2003, vol. 28, no. 4]
© 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2804-0002$10.00
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emerge through interlocking sets of representations, then it would seem imperative to examine how authors who work in multiple genres might bring the representational strategies of those genres to bear on individual texts. To this end, in the following pages I will show how Butler participates in Afro-feminist projects to interrogate the relationship between historical memory and commercial culture by appropriating and adapting the commercial form of science fiction itself.
Published in 1979, Kindred emerged at the end of two decades of intense debate over the representation of African-American history. Spurred on by the grassroots work of civil rights, feminist, and new left activists in the 1960s, scholars in the U.S. academy “began to appreciate how ‘history’ was made not solely by the imperial powers of a nation but also by those without any discernable institutional power” (Rushdy 1999, 4). This led to certain changes in the production of scholarly and official histories as academics pursued research projects geared to acknowledge “America” as the dynamic product of complex negotiations between people of diverse races, classes, and genders. In particular, with the establishment of a black power intellectual presence in the academy, the study of American history also became the study of African-American history, and new historical sources—especially slave testimonials and narratives—provided the foundation for more inclusive models of memory.
Of course, official modes of memory were not the only—or even the primary—ones under scrutiny at this cultural moment. The 1960s and 1970s saw the dawn of a new commercial culture, marked especially by the rapid proliferation of a national (and even global) mass media.4 As African Americans began entering media-related fields in significant numbers (and as black market shares grew and black intellectuals turned their critical gazes on the mass media), commercial institutions found themselves scrambling to adjust. The complex results of this adjustment were perhaps most evident in the newest and most rapidly spreading of these institutions: television. While stereotypical black advertising figures such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben continued to haunt the airwaves throughout the 1970s, these stock characters were countered by a new kind of commercial advertisement that drew on the language of civil rights and black power movements. For instance, in its award-winning 1971 “Buy the world a Coke” campaign, Coca-Cola offered the American public a
4 For general discussions of this proliferation and its impact on American culture, see Leiss, Kline, and Jhally 1986 and Jameson 1991. For a more specific discussion of how the new commercial culture affected people of color, see Hogue 1996.
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utopian vision of racial equality through its depiction of well-groomed, racially diverse adolescents earnestly telling viewers that they’d “like to buy the world a Coke / To keep it company” (Rutherford 1994, 48). Meanwhile, McDonald’s paid tribute to black women juggling work with marriage and motherhood by encouraging them to “take a little break today at McDonald’s” with their families (Kern-Foxworth 1994, 163). Such images offered the public very specific ways of understanding and remembering American history. By emphasizing the egalitarian nature of contemporary race relations, they implicitly placed the struggle for equality in a past that seemed to bear little or no direct relation to the present. Furthermore, by asking viewers to understand this seemingly clean break with the past as a product of corporate benevolence, such images implicitly equated social and political equality with equality in the realm of consumption itself. Indeed, following cultural theorists extending back to Theodor Adorno, we might better understand this mode of remembering as a process of forgetting by which viewers elide their desires with those of the corporation and, in doing so, alienate themselves from the historical events that initially informed those desires.5
Elsewhere, however, television seemed to respond to emergent demands for more nuanced representations of American history in diametrically opposed ways. In particular, the 1977 premiere of Roots (the madefor-television miniseries based on Alex Haley’s novel [1976] by the same name) marked a turning point in commercial culture. Watched by more than 130 million viewers, Roots was perhaps the first truly public acknowledgment that America was founded largely on the labor of enslaved peoples (Beaulieu 1999, 145). Rather than simply replacing the bad old past with a shiny new future in which all races are equal under the sign of consumption, Roots insisted on remembering the American past as an era in which those futures were created through the consumption of black labor. As such, it appeared to perform the same kind of historical revision in the mass media that new left and black power intellectuals were enacting in the academy.
Although commercial modes of memory engaged with their official counterparts in complex and seemingly contradictory ways, the two modes remained bound together by their masculinist approaches to history. As late as 1981, Angela Davis noted that “those of us who have anxiously awaited a serious study of the Black woman during slavery remain, so far,
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disappointed” (quoted in Beaulieu 1999, 6).6 Other African-American feminists expressed a similar disappointment with representations of black women in the commercial realm. For instance, as Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu notes in her analysis of Roots, Haley (and the TV producers responsible for the miniseries) closely followed the patterns established in slave narratives written by men such as Frederick Douglass; as such, Roots focuses primarily on its protagonist, Kunta Kinte, as a rugged “loner . . . determined to save himself, and willing to compromise with his fellow captives only if it means securing his own freedom” (Beaulieu 1999, 146). Women, when depicted at any length, are either reduced to their biological function as child-bearers or presented in “the stock conventions of the suffering enslaved woman” (1999, 147) who inspires the heroic black man to action (Hogue 1996, 13; Rushdy 1999, 3). Similar if more truncated masculinist impulses informed advertising as well. For instance, the young working mother in the aforementioned McDonald’s commercial is also reduced to the role of the suffering woman, a victim of stress and overwork who, like her counterparts in Roots, inspires others (here, the benevolent corporation) to social action.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this time period marked the emergence of yet another mode of memory—the African-American woman’s neo–slave narrative. Authors including Gayl Jones, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison used this form—an updated interpretation of the nineteenth-century slave narrative—to imaginatively re-present African-American history in a form that privileged firsthand African-American perspectives over their white counterparts. More specifically, these authors addressed African-American women’s histories by following nineteenth-century authors such as Harriet Jacobs, shifting emphasis from the lone male hero to the female heroine enmeshed in networks of communal ties, and from literacy and public identity to family and personal self-worth (Foster 1994, xxx; Beaulieu 1999, 13–14). Writers also used the neo–slave narrative to comment on the historical relationship between black women and commercial culture. As Susan Willis argues, tragic characters such as Toni Morrison’s Pecola from The Bluest Eye and Hagar from Song of Solomon are “sublime manifestations” of the contradiction between commercial representations of equality through consumption and the “reality that translation into the dominant white model is impossible for marginalized people” (1991, 114). By insisting on and exploring the gaps between public fantasy and personal history
6 As Ann duCille (1996) notes, although writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and Jeanne Noble published books on black women’s history in the 1970s, the academy typically lauded white scholars such as Gerda Lerner as the primary pioneers in this field.
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in their fiction, such authors participated in longstanding, time-honored critical traditions of skepticism about (and even antagonism toward) the culture industries as perpetrators of—as Adorno puts it—“enlightenment as mass deception” (120).
Much like other Afro-feminist writers, Octavia Butler has expressed explicit concern with masculinist narratives of African-American history. In regard to Kindred, she comments:
When I got into college. . . the Black Power Movement was really underway with the young people, and I heard some remarks from a young man who was the same age I was but who had apparently never made the connection with what his parents did to keep him alive. . . . He said, “I’d like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents.” . . . That was actually the germ of the idea for Kindred ([1979] 1988). I’ve carried that comment with me for thirty years. He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older generation had to do, without really putting it into the context of being necessary not only for their lives but his as well. (Rowell 1996, 51)
As Butler suggests here, one of the goals of Kindred is to re-present historical memory in a way that acknowledges the impact of slavery not just on isolated individuals but on entire families and networks of kin. Indeed, she goes on to specifically critique the masculinist figure of the heroic loner, noting that although she began the novel with a male protagonist she had to switch his sex because “I couldn’t realistically keep him alive. So many things that he did would have been likely to get him killed. He wouldn’t even have time to learn the rules [of antebellum life] . . . before he was killed for not knowing them” (Rowell 1996, 51). For Butler, then, the fantasy of the ruggedly individualistic hero—especially when that hero is black and subject to the laws of American slavery—is an impossible one, even in the realm of speculative fiction.7
Butler begins to depart from other neo–slave narrative authors, however, in her relationship to commercial culture; after all, her literary rep-
7 Although a full examination of this issue is beyond the scope of the present essay, it is important to note that elsewhere in Kindred, Butler interrogates the raced implications of figures such as the heroic, rugged loner through her depiction of Kevin, Dana’s white husband. Unlike the black male protagonist whom Butler initially intended to depict, Kevin is, at least to a certain extent, able to assume this role and survive the antebellum South. In doing so, however, he relegates himself to the position of a relatively minor player in history.
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utation is derived primarily from her participation in one increasingly prominent part of commercial culture: science fiction. While this seems to set her apart from other neo–slave narrative authors in some ways, it does align her with another African-American literary tradition. Sheree Thomas notes that authors extending back to Ralph Ellison and W. E. B. DuBois have long used science fiction tropes, including alternate worlds, invisibility, and the “encounter with the alien other,” to estrange readers from dominant understandings of American history and to re-present “the impact and influence of black life on society” (2000, xii). In the 1960s and 1970s, black writers, including Samuel Delany and Butler, joined their white feminist counterparts in publishing full-scale science fiction stories and novels. For these authors, science fiction provided more than just a way to re-present history; it allowed them to explore how such revisions might lead to new and more egalitarian futures as well. As Sarah Lefanu puts it, “unlike other forms of genre writing, such as detective stories and romance, which demand the reinstatement of order and can thus be described as ‘closed’ texts, science fiction is by its nature interrogative, open. Feminism questions a given order in political terms, while science fiction questions it in imaginative terms” (1988, 100).8 Taken together, then, both the tropes and the form of science fiction provide Butler with the tools to build the kind of memory machine adequate to the needs of Afro-feminist historical revision.
And, indeed, Butler does just that with her self-described “grim fantasy,” Kindred.9 The novel follows the story of Dana, a young black woman struggling to make her name as an author in present-day California. Mysteriously pulled through space and time to antebellum Maryland, Dana comes face to face with her slave heritage on the Weylin plantation and discovers that she must arrange the rape of a free black woman by the slaveowner Rufus Weylin in order to ensure her own birth. Taken as a slave herself, Dana seems torn between two equal—and equally bleak—options: either she submits to Rufus’s—and history’s—demands and thus preserves her family line or she resists these demands and runs the risk of never being born herself. To resolve this temporal paradox, Dana—and, by extension, Butler’s readers—must learn to understand history itself as a process of narrative production.
Throughout the first half of Kindred, Butler specifically uses the science fiction device of time travel to problematize the production of historical
8 For similar arguments launched by feminist science fiction authors themselves, see Sargent 1975.
9 Quoted in Crossley 1988.
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memory, especially in its commercialized form. As Damien Broderick notes, such devices allow authors to show how “no element of our own reality can be counted upon automatically to remain as a given, although ideological analysis may readily locate, precisely here, representations of those features rendered invisible by power and usage even as they dictate our lives” (1995, 26). Such analysis clearly pervades the early sections of Butler’s novel. For instance, in her first trip to the past, Dana finds herself suddenly transported to a river in the Maryland woods of 1819, where she saves a young Rufus from drowning. When Rufus’s gun-wielding father appears, she returns to her own world in an equally sudden manner. The whole encounter seems highly surreal to Dana, “like something I saw on television . . . something I got second-hand” (17). By resorting to the prosaic metaphor of watching television, Dana distances herself from the disturbing possibility that the past might be something that quite literally touches her. Almost immediately, then, Butler shows how commercial modes of memory alienate individuals from history in potentially dangerous ways.
Butler also uses time travel to expose the masculinist bias inherent in commercial modes of memory. On her second trip to antebellum Maryland, Dana stumbles upon a group of white patrollers beating a black slave for sneaking off the plantation to visit his free wife and child:
I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop! . . . I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their back and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My face too was wet with tears. (36)
This passage dramatizes precisely the kind of criticism other black women writers of the 1970s and 1980s leveled at commercial television shows like Roots and The Civil War. While such programs might prepare Dana for certain aspects of history—the dramatic struggle of the runaway slave, for instance—they do little or nothing to prepare her for the impact these actions might have on the families of the heroic individual so often central to those same programs.
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Elsewhere, Butler extends her critique of the masculinist bias in commercial modes of memory to their official or scholarly counterparts. Once she realizes that she will continue to travel through time until she ensures that Rufus grows up to initiate her family line, Dana vows to make the best of her situation by teaching the slave children around her to read and write—and to run for freedom as soon as they can (98). Thus, Dana tries to make sense of her new world by adopting the “literacy-identityfreedom” paradigm typically associated with the male-oriented slave narratives produced by nineteenth-century authors such as Frederick Douglass and reproduced later by twentieth-century writers such as Alex Haley. Within this paradigm, the enslaved person’s acquisition of language skills is the first—and most significant—step toward the acquisition of both psychological and physical freedom; other identifying characteristics are usually downplayed or even erased.10
Like other Afro-feminist critics, Butler suggests that while this paradigm is an important part of African-American history, it cannot adequately account for the gendered dimensions of that history. Again, she specifically uses time travel to underscore this point. On catching Dana and one of her pupils in the cookhouse with some books, Rufus’s infuriated father beats Dana mercilessly. As she falls unconscious and feels herself pulled back to California, the shocked Dana can only protest that “this wasn’t supposed to happen. . . . No white had [ever] come into the cookhouse before” (106). On returning to antebellum Maryland several weeks later, Dana is further horrified when she learns that her disappearance prompted the confused and enraged Weylin to punish her fellow slaves by selling some of their family members away from the plantation. Here, then, the partial nature of masculinist narrative structures leads Dana to misread history and her relationship to it in two ways. First, of course, she fails to anticipate Weylin’s appearance in the cookhouse because she perceives the master-slave relationship as simply raced rather than raced and gendered. In other words, by forgetting that the cookhouse is a both black and feminine space, Dana also forgets that it is subject to masculine surveillance and penetration. Second, these narrative structures lead Dana to understand herself as a lone individual battling the abstract forces of history rather than as someone enmeshed in familial and communal networks. Thus, she fails to anticipate that her actions might have consequences for
10 For general discussions of the “literacy-identity-freedom” paradigm in nineteenth-century slave narratives, see Olney 1985; Gates 1987; and Foster 1994. For discussions of how this paradigm was specifically central to male authors, see Twagilimana 1997; Beaulieu 1999; and Rushdy 1999.
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those around her—consequences that her travel through time underscores with startling clarity.
The cookhouse scene marks a turning point in Kindred as Dana begins to search for a mode of historical memory more appropriate to the experiences of African-American women. Significantly, Butler’s use of science fiction devices also begins to shift at this point. As Marleen Barr notes, in science fiction “the alien other” typically signifies a certain anxiety about the raced and/or gendered other. However, women writers often appropriate this device to address their own political concerns: “Women— especially black women—who are alien to patriarchal society, alter fiction’s depiction of the alien. . . . In opposition to science fiction stereotypes about vanquishing aliens, [these writers’ characters] join with or are assisted by the aliens they could be expected to view as epitomizing the very opposite of humanness. These female characters, who are themselves the Other, do not oppose the Other” (1993, 98–99). More specifically, if feminist characters ally themselves with the alien other, it is precisely because this other “struggles to declare and create the truth” of marginalized people’s lives outside those ordained by dominant modes of historical memory (99).
The shift to new modes of memory and new relations to the alien other begins almost immediately after the cookhouse scene. Upon her return to California, Dana resolutely reads and then purges her home of “everything . . . that was even distantly related to the subject [of slavery]. . . . [Their] versions of happy darkies in tender loving bondage were more than I could stand” (116). Simultaneously, she immerses herself in other, distinctly non-American stories of race relations and cultural power. Poring through testimonials from Nazi concentration camp survivors, Dana realizes that her experience of history is not unique, that “the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred” (117). If Jewish Holocaust stories begin to provide Dana with a new framework for understanding African-American history, it is because they are, ultimately, alien to that experience. Outside the constraints of dominant American modes of memory, they can “declare and create the truth” of both past and present-day power relations.
Elsewhere, Butler specifically uses the encounter with the alien other to carry out the Afro-feminist project of debunking cultural stereotypes of black women as happy mammies or long-suffering victims. Early in Kindred Dana dismisses Sarah the house manager as the stereotypical mammy who remains loyal to her white owners—even when they sell her eldest children off the plantation—because these same owners have
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deigned to give her a nominal position of power over the other slaves. On her next trip to antebellum Maryland, however, Dana recognizes Sarah as a “frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose” (145), one who plays the part of the mammy out of love for her remaining children and fear that, if she does not, they will be taken from her. This insight forces Dana to reconsider her similarities to Sarah. Previously, of course, Dana assumed that her mixed feelings about Rufus were “something new, something that didn’t even have a name” (29). Now, however, she begins to see that this seemingly unique relationship parallels that of all the blacks and whites on the Weylin plantation—in other words, that her personal experience is not alien to, but instead part and parcel of, the American social experience as whole.
Finally, Butler uses the revised encounter with the alien other to show how contemporary black women like Dana might learn to reassess their own relations to history. Initially, this is a difficult task for Dana because there are few (if any) cultural narratives available to help her articulate this. Indeed, she only does so with the help of Carrie, the young house slave triply othered from American history by virtue of her race, gender, and the fact that, as a mute, she seems to be left outside of language itself. After Dana earns the scorn of the other plantation slaves for helping Rufus rape Alice, she tries to make sense of the situation by positioning herself as the long-suffering victim of fate, telling Carrie: “I can see why there are those here who think I’m more white than black” (224). Carrie vehemently negates this claim, wiping her fingers on Dana’s face and then showing Dana both sides of her hand—an action that Dana does not understand until Carrie’s husband explains that “she means it don’t come off, Dana. . . the black. The devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are” (224). In this scene, Carrie silently but powerfully insists on the importance of understanding oneself outside reductive modes of historical memory. As a black woman trying to survive slavery, Dana is more than a traitor to her race or a victim of fate. Instead, as Carrie suggests, Dana’s rich and complex identity as a black woman “don’t come off” just because she has had to make hard choices that are themselves neither wholly black nor white; instead, that identity is informed by those choices. Here, then, Carrie asks Dana to acknowledge that she, too, is the alien other of history.
As Mae G. Henderson argues in her study of contemporary Afro-feminist authors, black women’s literature is “generated less by neurotic anxiety or dis-ease than by an emancipatory impulse which engages both hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse” (1989, 37). For Butler, truly emancipatory engagements with—and revisions of—racist
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What I thought was so interesting aboutthis book is that it began with a prologue about a more recent even, and went all the way back into the past.This gave a lot of insight about the book itself, while also giving it a more complicated meaning for the reader since we had no clue what the book was about yet.
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The story altogether progresses so quickly as Dana attempts to connect all the cues to why she is in this historical place right at this time, only to find out that this is her great grandfather. Cruel is an exceptional word to describe this situation because Dana was absolutely startled by the plantantion, as well as the fear of being in a stranger’s house where death could come crawling in any second.
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It is very interesting to analyze the role that science fiction fills in the entirety of the piece. Science fiction became popularized starting out of the 1950’s, with this book being written not long afterwards, it is interesting to look at the piece’s overall place that it also fills in the science fiction movement as well.
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Kindred is probably the first novel I read that combines science fiction and historical fiction so creatively; science fiction allows Olivia to answer the question, “what would I do if I were sent in the past?”
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The readers of Kindred not only get the first hand experience of what a modern day woman would feel like in the old times of slavery. But also the science fiction mystery of how she actually got there. Very engaging and thematic.
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“wrong side of history” means your story perhaps hasn’t been accurately recorded – and it certainly isn’t the official telling.
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dana in the beginning is not as connected with her ancestors as the story goes on she finds herself connecting with them and finding more out about herself.
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Is Kindred really a science fiction story purely just because of its inclusion of time travel? Personally, I’d categorize it as “historical fantasy fiction.”
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From the beginning, Dana is connected and empathetic of her ancestor’s struggles in history. She finds herself experiencing similar traumas to them the longer she stays in their time and therefore becoming more connected.
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It is important that the book specifically emphasizes the history of the African American women who experienced the most challenges and hardships throughout this time; reminds of me of the social class pyramid where Dana was very near the bottom. Even African American men had somewhat more advantages.
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I find it interesting how Dana was originally going to be a man but Olivia could not find a way to make it possible. I feel like the main protagonist being a woman helps make the novel more meaningful; with black women being in the lowest of the hierarchy it makes Dana’s journey more impactful.
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Butler’s, these two disciplines are able to harmoniously blend together.
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I have heard the book came from the comments of the young man – put him in the place of his ancestors and see what he would do…
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The concept brought up of how the use of science fiction could impact the historical fiction is not something I ever thought of. Due to the narrative trying to be conveyed could it be that Butler focuses on trying to convey the message of the piece to the reader over the historical accuracy.
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thought, but throughout history, fleeting distractions have prevented societies from seeing abuse.
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usually, in representing complex subjects, different stances are assumed and developed by diverse personalities. in using a genre as a strategy, characters develop more abstractly, allowing a greater focus on underlying themes. as an audience looks to relate the story to their own experiences, the contrast between fiction and truth allows—in this case—race, gender, and history to stand out. their role in supporting realism and understanding continually engages the reader in their significance.
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It is interesting that many authors writing about racism in the U.S. focus on forms of science fiction to convey their stories. I can see many connections between Morrison’s Beloved and the influence Beloved has over the mother and Dana’s interactions with Rufus in Kindred.
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It’s amazing how different authors uyse different methods of conveying the same themes. Like many perspectives of slavery, slavery (and that time) clashing with the modern world, the amount of perspectives are almost infinite.
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This concept of “discernable institutional power” is interesting. It begs the question: How have marginalized communities developed our contemporary societal framework? How do the losses and legacies of slavery permeate our lives today? To what degree have African-Americans influenced popular culture?
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It is interesting how in this era we saw a change to more perspectives and experiences. Rather than having solely the imperialist narrative and that of the white man, more and more information was being geared to the less seen perspectives and complex histories such as the Native Americans who lived in America before colonization. It is interesting to then see this reemergence of this concept in the modern day as we try to look through history through more lens than we did before. With Columbus now becoming a hated figure and historians trying to change the narrative that Africa, Asia, and the Americas lacked complex societies before European history encountered them is very interesting to see in this greater context.
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Its very interesting how a time of societal change was created through the counter culture of the 60s, part of which being inspired probably by the war in Vietnam.
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Kindred was not the first story to be told from the perspective of a minority, but it was ahead of its time in terms of racial and female representation and paved the way for other authors to tell stories from a black female’s perspective.
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In the novel, we can see how Dana’s life has been impacted by the feminist and civil rights movements in both the 1970 and 1820s. She would have fought very hard up until when the plot starts to be recognized for her work that traveling back to a time that ignores her opinions and existence, even more, is not necessarily a change, but a stab in the heart for everything she has worked for to be torn away again.
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With 1979 being a time in America with deep racism and misogyny, Dana helped show what diversity and representation can do in the realm of literature.
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Obviously not slavery, but a time where women, and especially black women were heavily oppressed.
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takes into account the personal nature of history. not simply events or statistics. the repercussions on thought, expression, and community are significant in documenting historical evolution.
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In 2020 with the uproar of BLM protests and people asking what is ethical and what isn’t, we see a rise in the idea of education expanding. Just like in the 60s where history became not only what the government and the powerful people said but also the ideas of the smaller person.
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I think it states how history is not confined to government records or the recordings of influential people. it’s also told from the viewpoint of the least influential, like slaves. Most of the first-hand stories are out of the personal writings of slaves and people on the underground railroad.
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Although more academics were looking at multiplicity and histories, it was limited. There is so much DEI work that needs to be done to better inform oneself on the multiple perspectives of history.
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In kindred, Dana being educated is such an alien subject that she is almost opressed more for it, she is made fun of for it until her masters and other slaves realize they can use her for it. This represents the power academics had in that time.
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In particular although there are many books written on this topic, I think it’s easy to recognize that Kindred displayed some important purposes such as the constant changes in culture and expectations in our society that eventually leads to conflict.
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In Kindred,these stereotypes are explored but made known that the stereotypes are false based on the influence Dana has as well as Kevin’s ability to lighten the atmosphere of the past.
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Specifically, Butler introduced a unique concept of placing a modern character in a past, where they’re identity is abused. From there, the reader is treated with curious interactions and situations.
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These campaigns to promote egalitarianism feel a little disingenuous. I think that these companies are just pandering to the societal attitudes at the time instead of promulgating morally correct messages out of intrinsic motivation.
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It seems very 21st century to think of advertisements by companies taking string social issues, the Pepsi ending racism and Gillette toxic masculinity coming to mind. However, even at the turn of the century companies were making ads to target growing demographics and acknowledge other groups. It is interesting though to visualize this change in advertising where it started from growing demographic representation by showing more diversity in ads to taking full strong stances on prevalent issues to try to enlarge profits.
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Here, the past and present are supposedly unconnected, whereas in Kindred the whole story is about the connection between the past and present as well as change over time and how this causes a change in attitudes.
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The emphasis on the current state of things silenced the past. No wonder racial tensions are an issue in contemporary society.
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The way that these companies are advertising do no real good in the grand scheme of things, and feel performative, not like an actual attempt to change.
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By coming out as allies, they are perhaps feeding into the “fantasy” of forward progress.
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It is convenient for white people to willfully ignore past abuses in the light of uplifting modern-day successes. The abhorrent actions of the past have stained white history, and have the capability of ruining eurocentric history. But beyond this embarrassment, willful ignorance is exercised to keep African-Americans out of power. By pointing out the seemingly egalitarian nature of today’s society, white people can use tropes like “not working hard” or “innate stupidity” as arguments for contemporary black plight. Of course, this is not the case. Rather, it is that forgotten history that puts racial minorities at a present-day disadvantage.
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The point made at the end of this paragraph still echoes throughout the modern day. No thought is really given to the horrid historical events of the past unless one takes the time to look back.
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I recall watching part of Roots a few years back, although we never watched the entirety of it. From what I saw though, it definitely brought to light the similar sort of things that Kindred does.
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I am curious at how many people watched Roots when it premiered and realized/acknowledged that America was founded on the labor of enslaved people. Before this point, but after the surge of the civil rights movement (the mid-1900s) how history of enslavement taught/acknowledged?
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kindred and roots and very much similar they both focus on the everyday horror stories of slavery ,this is telling us we need to pay more attention to what really went on and improve our future
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Both of these medias describe the realities of life in thsi time exeedingly well, with graphic detail and storyline that draws the emotions out of the viewer/reader. I think both of these medias could drastically change a persons point of veiw on the subject.
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Kindred and Roots are similar in that both focus on the horrors of slavery, specifically Dana being surprised by the games that the children played and the separation of families. This illustrates how it is important to focus on the past at times to better understand and improve the future.
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We need to be educated on things like this, because it’s important. We can’t just pretend like it didn’t happen, because it did. The more we realize how much we messed up in our past, the more we can do to learn, and change our futures for the better.
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Equality diminishes the distinction of a group. Personally, I believe equality is only reached when something has no value. Therefore, to try to hold up a group of people by comparing them to another is morally absurd. In Kindred, Butler remembers a past of the strength and endurance of African Americans. To elevate race, she focuses on the inherent abilities, merit, and integrity of a group of people.
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In the same way in Kindred, Dana, as a modern woman, gets a first hand experience of real slavery. In the same way that we can’t just gloss over the history of slavery, we can’t compare it to the “shiny new future” without noting that the industrialization of early America (on the back of enslaved peoples labor) made the American society what it is today.
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I think that is what makes Octavia Butler and her characters (especially Dana) so unique. Dana is shown as an independent character who does not get saved but saves others. Butler also shows how women that were enslaved were frequently raped not only because they couldn’t fight back, but because they knew they can not escape for fear for their lives or their children’s.
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this is the first book i have seen both strongly represnting black history and incorporating science fiction.
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Representation back then and even today are very important issues. There are very little pieces of American media and literature before 1979 I can think of that display a black protagonist in a good lighting. Kindred shows the importance of representation.
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Douglass and Dana are similar in that they both try to follow the ways of the world based on the situations that they are in, but when they are in their darkest moments and are tired of living as slaves, they fight back against those who try to control them. This is an important sentiment in civil rights ideals.
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This stereotypical role of women, especially as slaves is portrayed throughout Kindred through Weylin’s children with slaves, Kevin’s fake slave, and master relationship, and through Rufus and Alice’s relationship.
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Butler places the protagonist at center of it all – and silences the white male voice by separating Dana and Kevin.
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With every movement it feels like someone is left out. With the ERA, members of the LGBTQ+ community who fought hard for the amendment, where ultimately disappointed by the fact that they took a less strong stance for their rights fearing that it would harm the possibility of others recognition. Every movement tries its best to represent and do its best, but their is always a group that is one step beneath that is forgotten in the fight for representation. This is then interesting to look into Kindred and see if there is anything flawed in representation. If taking a less strict historical fiction approach to the story, that Butler could have left some stories out of her own.
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I’ve noticed women have been the only ones brave enough to plot out and plan escape from the property through the whole story (even if they are accompanied by men such as in Alice and Isaacs situation). This can either represent the fear from being a black woman at the time or their sheer courage to try and escape.
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It’s really hard with things like this, because a lot of the story isn’t told. It’s from one point of view, and sometimes doesn’t tell the whole story that should be told. That’s why Kindred is so important, because it memorializes that women are powerful in to media as well.
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That women were just as brave during this time or even in general just as much as men
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is action inspired by the display of ability or solely by suffering? The groups which are supported by social action usually are decided by the recognition of their worth. Social movements can be anticipated after periods of creativity and cultural revival so that increased recognition of worth inspires debate and allows an oppressed narrative to captivate society. The commercial mentioned does not create an identity outside of suffering, and in fact, influences the perception of young working mothers in a negative way. Anyone can suffer, but how a person responds to a stressor may highlight admirable qualities and inspire positive social evolution. Butler focuses on Dana’s solutions to her circumstance rather than the magnitude of suffering she endures, making her someone that may motivate others rather than attract sympathy for her weakness.
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Black women are in this time still portrayed as someone to be helped, or someone who is suffering and not doing well in life. It shows that even as things became better in racial differences, the stereotypes for black people, women, and especially black women remained. (Also ties into my comment on companies having no morals and just going with trends to make money.)
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I find it interesting in how Butler used these communal ties to shape the heroine, Dana. Outside of educational superiority and literacy, Dana brings more progressive societal ideals back with her to the past. This allows for a more complex and nuanced relationship between historical and contemporary characters.
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Neo-narratives challenged the mass media’s message that marginalized people would be accepted into the white model.
I wonder if the discussion now would be about devising a new model – this statement implies there is only one way – and all other models are erroneous. How does one understand their place in the world if their reality differs so completely from the fantasy sold to everyone?
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Pecola and Alice both face challenging situations in the novels that they are in as they are submitted to violence because of their lower social roles in society. Both also look for better futures wanting to be free or have blue eyes as these are means of establishing themselves in society, as they struggle with personal identity due to racism.
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Could the author have taken inspiration for Dana’s ancestor Hagar’s name from “Song of Solomon”?
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‘public fantasy’ is a descriptive way of labeling commercial views. As in any fantasy, representation of a concept is not the only factor in perpetuating stereotypes. The individuals who keep the perspective show an interest in a certain view which is exploited in industrial public appeal. What makes a commercial model so challenging to modify is the group that backs it up. Often, as individuals we can recognize backhanded comments, but with cases that front support for a cause, it is hard to continue an argument against them.
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I feel that it is so important when reading books like Kindred to look at authors like Butler’s exigence behind the piece. The fact that black women’s representation was so lacking probably fueled much of her steam behind the piece. Looking at that it is interesting to think what was her goal in representing. What did she want Dana and her story to represent in the female African American and their history.
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Sometimes it can be very hard to look back at ones ancestors and try to understand why they did what they did. I believe Olivia did a great job showing this through her novel; with Dana slowly submitting to her life as a slave in the past.
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Octavia is an incredible writer for being able to take one comment and turn it into an entire novel. The way that it allowed and inspired her to create a story important to women who are POC is incredible.
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This is precisely Dana’s struggle – how does she preserve her existence…especially now that she has formed a family with these individuals?
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I think Octavia did a great job as a writer not only taking a comment but also a historical time and turning into a novel the way she did.
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I think it can be taken for granted on weather male or female were treated worse or better during slavery , men did have the more intense work but women also had to deal with there part as well
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The author here introduces an interesting concept – networks of kin. Kin can be interpreted beyond biological relation in Kindred. For example, Kevin and Dana can be related through epochal networks of kin, but they differ in their racial network of kin. Therefore, a conflict between familiarization and opposition takes place. Dana and the other slaves share a racial network of kin, but their epochal differences present more complex conflicts. Dana and the Weylands’ also share educational networks of kin, but obvious racial and hierarchical differences persist. Each relationship is magnified under a duality of kinmanship and stark constrast.
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Memory has power – and collective memory requires constant re-memory. It reminds me of the Holocaust. Many European countries surround themselves with the past and spend time trying to understand the past. This is healing. As a country, we don’t do that – and then wonder why there are such divisions.
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Butler does this by showing enslaved families and how they are connected to one another rather than individuals. She also shows the danger of having a family if you were enslaved, all of Sarah’s children were taken away except for one, who she protects so
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Male slaves were often treated worse because men are historically seen as the “stronger sex”. Because of this, male slaves were usually made to do the more dangerous and physically taxing tasks on the plantation, while the women were usually tasked with cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. People back then believed that women were pure and needed to be taken care of because people thought they couldn’t defend themselves as well as men. Mistreating women is wrongly seen as worse that mistreating men, when both should be seen as equally bad.
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I always love hearing stories about the creative process, you always end up hearing interesting things that were cut or changed. In this case however, I think it was a good choice (not just realistically of course) to have switched the gender of the protagonist.
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Olivia was right with the idea that a male protagonist would not survive longer than a female protagonist in Kindred. It is important to look at the differences between male and female. If a man did a wrongdoing it was more likely for them to get killed as a punishment. Although, even if a women would probably not get killed if she did a wrongdoing, she would still receive severe punishment, let alone the severe sexual harassment they would face towards their owners.
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This is a really sad realization. It’s awful that people who were slaves were even subjected to this kind of treatment. It’s also heartbreaking to hear that originally she had a male protagonist, but he wouldn’t get away with things that the female protagonist would be able to. Either way, the main character is faced with horrible treatment.
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I hadn’t thought of this before, but Butler is correct that a male protagonist who performed the same actions as Dana would have been killed. Dana is able to get away with more than she should because early in the book she is considered weak and while intelligent, she is still a woman. Later in the novel, Rufus regards Dana with more affection because of her gender, if she was male and challenging him, he would have found it threatening and likely sold/killed him. Both of these actions show how men in the story misjudge Dana for her gender, if Butler had stuck to the original protagonist she would have created a very different story.
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To separate the African American identity from dominant understandings with science fiction tropes is an interesting concept. It shows the importance a single word or introduction can hold. using “invisibility” or an “alien encounter” entice a reader to relearn a group and become more receptive to recognizing contradictions in their previous generalizations.
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The thought of having to use mechanisms to “distance” information in order for it to be consumed…it reminds me of how distanced Dana is at the beginning – and how 1976 serves as a shield.
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This is really interesting. I genuinely have never thought about a story that’s being told in a way with time travel, that includes such real storytelling. The way that Octavia Butler executed it is incredible.
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The use of fictional genres like fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism can help critique society. Using tropes that exceed reality is a perfect way to shape an ongoing problem and why It needs to be solved. Not only does it draw in a reader, but it can expand a subject.
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I think kindred beautifully combines both political and science-fiction/ history topics. For example when Dana gets mad at Rufus for objectifying, abusing and raping Alice after he claims he loves her. This shows the messy, uneducated man he is becoming that fits in with most of the men of his time. However later she explains to Sarah? (not sure if it was Sarah specifically) how times are different in 1976 and her and Kevin are in a devoted, mixed race, not abusive relationship.
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It is interesting in how Butler self-describes the piece with “grim fantasy.” In using such language she acknowledges the harsh, gritty tone of the piece, yet with fantasy tells how it is a story. It is not to a tee in its reality but serves more to describe a message rather than the pure actions of the story.
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Just a little discretion is advised here. DONT READ ITS A HUGE SPOILER!!!
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This internal conflict is not only important in Kindred, but also in other novels such as Beloved, where Beloved’s mother fails to see the darkness in Beloved due to their connection as mother and daughter, which ultimately leads to her struggle throughout the novel. This contrasts with Kindred because Dana fails to let Rufus control her anymore by the end of the novel, which allows her to escape from the confines of the abusive relationship she has with her ancestor, unlike Beloved’s mother.
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This situation does not satisfy any aspect of the categorical imperative. Therefore, Dana is in a situation where her existence is reliant upon the execution of a morally depraved task. I wonder if committing this task is inherently self-serving.
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The interesting conundrum to all of this is that Dana doesn’t want to betray Rufus eventually. Instead of feeling this responsibility and requirement, she begins to feel at home with the people there. Butler’s choice to not have Dana hate Rufus is interesting because it makes her feel guilty for forgiving him every time he does something wrong. This is another aspect of the book that would not have been different if her main charecter was male.
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I think one of the greatest things Olivia has done with the novel is making Kindred a first person point of view book with Dana as an unreliable narrator. This forces the reader to follow through the harsh reality Dana has to go through while also understanding what goes on in her head.
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It’s really tough to think about things like this, because you’re like, “Man, I can’t imagine this ever happening to me.” And the awful thing is that it truly did happen to others. It’s still happening today, a lot of us just happen to be fortunate. Dana’s story helps give a first person point of view so we can understand how it may have felt to live during that time period.
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I have to disagree with the essay here. I feel like the descriptions of the memories created in the past fading away are just a side effect of time travel, rather than Dana just distancing herself from the idea that “the past can touch her”. Although I will admit that I may just be interpreting things too literally.
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I appreciated Butler’s writing early on. In this quote I enjoyed how she engages the senses, her repetition of ‘every’, the list of vivid verbs, Dana’s own questioning and physical response to the scene, the comparison of media representation in addition to the affects of the violence on a child, etc. She pulls the reader into the circumstance just as the character herself is pulled in. It’s a clever way to set up a novel.
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Dana is supposed to play the role of her, but keeps getting knocked down by racism, mysogeny, and social statuses of the time. Traumas like these make it increasingly more difficult to figure out what she is there for and how she is supposed to execute it.
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The writer makes a good point here honestly. In similar narratives, the repercussions of the actions of the protagonist on the other enslaved people are not really discussed in-depth or even brought up most of the time. In Kindred however, these tensions provide the bulk of the novel’s conflict.
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This makes a wonderful point while dana is playing the role of a slave but each time she’s keeps getting knocked down by the racism and realization of what’s really going on while she’s trying to find out her families history.
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When critiquing masculinitst bias, it is interesting to think of any of her own personal biases that she may have when writing the piece. Everyone has biases and it is interesting to see how they effect the work of the piece.
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In essence, a typical view of power would be associated with masculinity, while Butler addresses how knowledge and identity is true power, which isn’t limited to a specific sex.
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This concept of literary allowing slaves to escape is important in many novels, such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, where Frederick Bailey, later Douglass, describes how learning to read The Columbian Orator, gave him a voice and allowed him to make his struggles and the struggles of so many others known once he achieved his freedom. Dana, being from the present in the 1970s, likely understands this concept, which is why she finds importance in educating the slaves she lives amongst in Kindred.
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Although Dana and the rest of the slaves are close in relationships, and pull some risks for eachother; banding together to rebel against the master seems out of the question. This is possible, they all have the power especially as adults because after all, Tom Weylin is only human. But the fact is that the trauma from punishment and the whole world being against them makes every one of them completely alone together.
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These ideas of women being known as “the other,” or someone who was supposed to live an operate in “a separate sphere” was emphasized during the antebellum period in U.S. history as well. These ideas are portrayed in Simone De Beauvoir’s novel, “The Second Sex” and many other feminist authors’ writings. Beauvoir describes how women were seen through a lens in which they were only allowed to preform mundane tasks, which often led to depression and confusion about one’s role in life. These ideas are explicated through various tests in order to illustrate the struggles that many endured in this time period.
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Dana sadly realized the hard way that the depictions of slavery in media are usually horribly falsified and made to be less horrific than they actually were. She resents people for ever trying to portray slavery as anything than what it actually was- a disgusting violation of human rights.
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Violating human rights is not unique to America. The fact that the similar things have happened throughout history and not just the injustices that Dana experienced makes everything even more depressing than it already is.
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Realizing that human rights epically is something that we have normalized and has gone on for years.
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Dana initially viewing Sarah as loyal to the people who enslaved her means Sarah is doing her job well. Sarah has to pretend to be loyal to make sure her children are not taken away from her, which is something many slave women had to do during that time period.
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I haven’t made it to this part of the text, but the pairing of Dana and Carrie seems important in widening narrative outside what is explicitly demonstrated. Some perspectives may be tucked away by nature, and because Butler is writing to demonstrate race outside of media generalization, she is showing that there is variety beyond what is given in her novel.
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Carrie’s character adds a lot to the story. She’s able to give meaningful additions to parts happening, without saying a word. It’s really good writing. This can also prove that a character does not need to be verbal to be insightful.
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While some characters, such as Weylin and Kevin, thought that Carrie was useless and stupid because she was mute, this scene portrays the wisdom she had and the ability to teach Dana about how they are viewed in society. It not only portrays Carrie’s intelligence, but it is also a moment of clarity for Dana because even though the other slaves there don’t understand Dana’s paradoxical circumstance and reasons for helping Rufus so often, they still understand that she is different and by helping someone who hurt them all as a collective, she is hurting “her people,” which in turns creates a tension in Kindred.
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Race is not defined by the way you act or the things you do, it’s defined by your heritage and nothing you do can ever change that
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In this moment Carrie shows Dana why her choices don’t make her “more white than black”. She has had to choose for her survival and because just like everyone else, she is human and is perfect. Butler shows how Dana – like many other women in real life – have had to make hard choices and no matter what they choose, someone will be there to scorn them.
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