Throughout Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Dana is reminded of her ancestral past through physical transportation and first-hand experience of slavery. In his critical essay, Philip Miletic outlines the literary context of the 1960’s and 1970’s to show how Kindred, a speculative fiction novel that takes place within and grapples majorly with slavery, is part of a highly political conversation about remembrance and history, patriarchy and gender, and the power of literacy and literature. These themes are somewhat independent in Miletic’s essay, but I argue, through the support as well as sometimes paradoxical disagreement of his arguments, that these themes are interconnected through the links of politics and rebellion, for example the Black Power …show more content…
According to Miletic, the organization called for authors and artists to move past representing slavery, and create a new genre of African American Literature without returning time and time again to speculative slave narratives and imagery. Butler took a stand against this push, while also, seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conformed to it. On one hand, Kindred is very obviously a novel that has slavery in the forefront. However, Octavia Butler created her own genre of African American Literature through her decision to make Dana foreign to the Antebellum era. She is a traveler on journey, whether than journey is time travel, a journey through multiple dimensions, or something else entirely is ambiguous, but the quasi science fiction journey aspect of the novel sets Kindred apart as a book redefining the African American genre as the Black Power and Black Arts movements called …show more content…
African American literature as a genre, of which the classification and nomenclature is a topic for another debate, is associated with slavery, suffering, poverty, sexual assault, etc. Both Percival Everett’s protagonist and Percival Everett himself struggled to have their works, which were topically outside slavery and mass suffering, published. One can gather how this exemplifies the Black movements’ reasoning behind the push towards a redefined genre. The success of tales of tragic suffering such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or Push by Sapphire, to name a few, contributed to pin holing the genre. It is very purposeful to have Dana be a female, African American, struggling writer in the 70’s Danas literacy. Unbeknownst to me while reading Kindred, Dana embodies the struggle for African American female authorship. Kevin, her white husband, is a published author. He makes comments about his superiority not limited to asking her to do his typing, and
Initially, because she underestimates her own courage, which has never been properly tested, Dana doubts that she has sufficient fortitude to survive in the nineteenth century. As Kindred unfolds, it becomes clear that she does, indeed, have abundant courage and stamina. Butler effectively utilizes a common technique in fiction whereby an individual becomes heroic by transcending his or her base humanity by drawing on hidden inner resources. Dana is tested in her second trip to the past when she is nearly raped by a white man who is part of a patrol—the forerunner to the Ku Klux Klan. Never before having experienced physical abuse, initially Dana is reluctant to act. She fails to disable him by gouging his eyes, thereby losing her only chance
Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 163-67. Print.
The first novel, Kindred involves the main character Dana, a young black woman, travelling through time to explore the antebellum south in the 1800’s. The author uses this novel to reveal the horrific events and discrimination correlated with the slaves of the south at the time. Dana, who is a black woman of modern day, has both slave and white ancestry, and she develops a strong connection to her ancestor Rufus, who was a slave owner at the time. This connection to Rufus indirectly causes Dana to travel into the past where she helps many people suffering in the time period. Butler effectively uses this novel to portray the harshness of slavery in history, and the impa...
Mat Johnsons novel, Pym challenges readers not only to view his work with a new set of eyes but also the work of all American literature with the understanding that the idea of Whiteness still has a very strong power over literature today. It is unfortunate that in today’s society, the pathology of Whiteness still holds a very strong presence in literary world. Literature from American authors versus literature from African American authors still continues to be segregated and handled with two different sets of criteria. Johnson’s novel engages in different aspects of the argument presented in Toni Morrison’s work entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. One of the main ideals that Pym engages in is the thought that “…a figuration of impenetrable whiteness … surfaces in American literature whenever Africanist presence is engaged” (29). Through the character Chris Jaynes, Johnson’s novel focuses much attention on the Whiteness seen in the literary world and how it still affects literature today. Mat Johnson’s Pym addresses Morrison’s argument by challenging the reader to identify the pathology of whiteness as well as encourages readers not to only identify the problem but try to find new ways to combat it.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print.
The relationship between slave and master. One of the the most complicated, unspoken of relationships in history. The book Kindred by Octavia E. Butler tells a compelling story of the relationship between a white man and an african american woman during slavery in the 1800’s. The tale starts with a woman, Dana, who travels back in time to 1800’s where she meets Rufus a young white boy. Throughout the story Dana learns about slavery through her experiences with Rufus and he eventually teaches her to truly understand the relationship between master and slave.
James, Johson Weldon. Comp. Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 832. Print.
Kindred by Octavia Butler is an incredible book that leaves the reader hypnotized. This story educates people on the first hand abuse of slavery. Butler took a woman of the modern era and transferred her back into a period
Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is categorized as science fiction because of the existence of time travel. However, the novel does not center on the schematics of this type of journey. Instead, the novel deals with the relationships forged between a Los Angeles woman from the 20th century, and slaves from the 19th century. Therefore, the mechanism of time travel allows the author a sort of freedom when writing this "slavery narrative" apart from her counterparts. Butler is able to judge the slavery from the point of view of a truly "free" black woman, as opposed to an enslaved one describing memories.
Toni Morrison. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
middle of paper ... ... ction Genre: Interview with Octavia Butler." Black Scholar. 1986 Mar.-Apr., 17:2. 14-18.
The civil rights movement may have technically ended in the nineteen sixties, but America is still feeling the adverse effects of this dark time in history today. African Americans were the group of people most affected by the Civil Rights Act and continue to be today. Great pain and suffering, though, usually amounts to great literature. This period in American history was no exception. Langston Hughes was a prolific writer before, during, and after the Civil Rights Act and produced many classic poems for African American literature. Hughes uses theme, point of view, and historical context in his poems “I, Too” and “Theme for English B” to expand the views on African American culture to his audience members.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Margolies, Edward. “History as Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968. 127-148. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 115-119. Print.
Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel since 1945. Ed. A. Robert Lee, a.s.c. London: Vision Press, 1980. 54-73.