Octavia Butler's Kindred: A Literary Analysis

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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

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